Eckart Begemann wrote
>1) Obviously PMX suppresses the output of full-bar pauses (r0) if
>they
> occur only in one voice ("line of music"). If they occur in both
> only one is put.
>
> Is there a possibility to override this (yet brillant(!)) feature?
(Due to length I won't reproduce Eckart's the sources...see the
original posting). It is definitely a *feature* but I don't know
about *brilliant*. More like "bug." As it now stands, behaviour of
full-bar rests (either "rp" or "r0") is erratic when there are 2 lines
of music. Werner has also been "bugging" me about this, and I plan to
get it all straightened out in the next version, and make full bar
rests behave just like any others, EXCEPT that they will always be
centered between the bar lines.
> (How do you say "Einsatz" in English?)
entrance ?
>2) In bar 53 I do not understand the vertical alignment: I tried several
> shifting manipulations but they did not yield what I want.
> If I do not shift anything the tenor would not strangely fall in
> between the two eights of the bass.
> Why?
> And how do you manipulate the shifting?
I'm confused. What I see is exactly what I expect: the half rest (NOT
a full-bar rest, so not horizontally centered), is raised 2\internote
from its "normal" position. If you want to raise it further, just use
e.g. r2+6. Remember that here the adjustment is relative to the
*middle* line of the staff, which is not the "untweaked" position when
there are 2 lines of music. (Most other PMX adjustments are relative
to the "untweaked" position). There is no specific way to shift a
rest horizontally, but you can use e.g. X1S r2 .
>3) Bar 25 raises the question: Does PMX provide a possibility to
> shorten the stems --- apart from the inline TeX method always available?
I'm happy to report that for beams the answer is yes, (RTFM), e.g.,
[+3 c84 d ] .
>4) Could PMX be asked to cope with more than 128 characters per line?
> One of the lines has as many as 127 characters although it contains
> only one bar. (This is due to a number of melismatic lyrics in that
> bar. I guess this case is not that singular as one might think at first
> sight.)
No. In PMX itself, there is NEVER a need for lines this long. If you
run across this problem due to M-Tx's restrictions, perhaps you could
break the bar in half using a blind meter change, and make the
intermediate barline invisible with in-line tex:
\let\xbt\xbar\def\xbar{\let\xbar\xbt}\
or, ask Dirk to let you break lines arbitrarily in M-Tx
>5) In bar 4 [of the second source] the grace note strangely makes PMX (or
>M-Tx?) forget the
>correct octave: I had to put an extra "-"-sign which is not consisent
>with PMX's usual octave handling.
>What is the reason?
Once again I'm puzzled by the question. What I see in voice #4 is a
middle c 8th at the end of bar 3, then grace-note b slurred to 8th
a-natural going down by single steps, just as they should according to
the input.
>6) In this piece it would be nice to enable PMX to handle an instrument
>with *two* systems which is not the 'first' ("bottom") instrument. I
>guess this is to much asking, right?
>How could I handle this problem?
I like this request, because it's already there, but undocumented. In
the setup data, make ninst negative, then put in ninst extra numbers
indicating how many staves for each instrument in succession. If you
want the 3rd and 4th staves combined, the setup would start
5 -4 1 1 2 1 ...
Warning: If the last 4 numbers don't add up to the first, your
computer will explode.
Remember you have decreased the # of inbstruments now, so you need one
fewer blank lines or inst. names.
>7) In Line 17 and 18 of the following file you find "%%%Ar" and
>"%%%K-1+2".
>So if you take off one of the %-characters, MusiXTeX should transpose
>the whole Arioso to D-major.
>(I am still using MusiXTeX T74.) The manual says, MusiXTeX would
>transpose and change everything correctly -- except for the natural
>signs "\na" which will not be changed. But I see a number of
>accidentals which are not changed correctly.
>(BTW: PMX's output file does not put "\transpose=-1" anywhere, so
>maybe PMX has its own method? Anyway, neither works: If I insert
>\relativeaccid\transpose=-1\generalsignature{2} in the tex-file,
>MusiXTeX would not transpose correctly,
>and if I trust only PMX, the piece is still not transposed correctly.
First, PMX *does* do its own transposition and does not use the TeX
\transpose register. But this is a separate matter from the following
discussion.
The only problem in your example is that in the original input you
have not entered the accidentals according to the relative-accidental
convention. But don't feel bad; you are not the first person to have
trouble with this concept. Relative accidentals mean "move the pitch
up 1/2 step" (sharp) or "... down 1/2 step" (flat) or "leave it the
same" . They have nothing to do with black notes vs white notes on a
keyboard. So to use this convention, with "Ar" set, in bar 3 the 7th
note in the top voice should have been originally entered as e-sharp,
because you wanted to raise it 1/2 step. It would then be printed as
e-natural in the untransposed original, and with K-1+2 it would come
out as d-sharp.
Obviously, it is very tedious to convert an input file using absolute
accidental to one using the relative-accidental convention. But that
would not be necessary if, in anticipation of any possible
transposition, you had entered the accidentals using the relative
convention in the first place.
I will not comment on your lengthy discussion about transposition,
because I am convinced that the algorithms are OK as they stand. I
haven't extensively checked far-out combinations, but I'd be surprised
to find any examples where the existing algorithms fail *if the notes
are entered correctly*, using the relative-accidental convention.
BTW, in baroque facsimiles and manuscripts, the *printed* music used
this convention.
--Don Simons
