For M-Tx:
1. Better documentation, especially a table of everything that can go
into an M-Tx source file, similar to the quick reference table for
PMX.
Ideally this should contain four parts:
a) what can appear in the Preamble
b) what can appear in the music lines
c) what can appear in the Uptext lines
d) what can appear in the lyrics lines
Section 3 lists some values that can be given for the Preamble
(e.g. C/ for meter) but doesn't provide a complete definition of
what you can put there. A lot of the questions I had to ask this
group for help with arose from incomplete documentation of the
prefix.
The index should include all the special characters/commands that
you can include. I notice that the index for version 0.40 is
considerably more complete than for 0.30, but there are still some
things missing (e.g., [ ] for forced beams,
2. Better error detection
For example, there should be at least a warning if there is a
mis-match between the number of lyrics syllables and the number of
notes. That would have helped me catch the case where I managed to
insert a space into a "syllable" (I had the syllable wrapped in
braces{} but M-Tx didn't recognize the special meaning that TeX
assigns to them).
3. Recognize some standard TeX input forms and be able to tell what to
do with them. The braces I mentioned above are one example. Others
include --, ---, and $-$ for en-dash, em-dash, and minus-sign,
respectively. (In fact, I would like some way of including a hyphen
in a syllable without having to code something like {\hyp}).
4. Allow longer lines and more data in %% lines. I ended up putting
part of the header of one piece into a separate file that I included
with %% \\input\ , because I had more stuff than M-Tx was willing
to allow.
5. Allow comments in the Preamble. This would make it easier to
switch between the Bars/Line: and the Systems: & Pages: forms when
I'm tuning my input. Currently I have to not only comment them out
but move them from the Preamble to the next section (nominally part of
the first "paragraph", although I usually think of all that gunk that
I use at the start of my pieces as if it were a separate section).
For pmx:
1. Be willing to accept L and LP commands even if the number of pages
is "0" (unknown). I don't see why I should be forced to specify
number of systems and number of pages before I can introduce a forced
line break.
2. Write in C. Fortran compilers are hard to come by these days.
I guess for the time being I'll have to use the old version of PMX
that I have, since I can't compile the new 1.38 version on my AIX
system.
Finally,
A wish for MusiXTeX: To date, if I want to have both sheet music
and blocks of text on a page, I have to print them separately and
cut-and-tape pieces of paper. This is outmoded. I would like to be
able to tell MusiXTex "Here is some text. Pass it unmodified to TeX,
then resume setting music."
Of course, if I do that, the pre-processors will no longer know how
many systems will fit on the page, so I should be responsible for
telling them where to break pages.
I dunno, maybe I'm using the wrong preprocessor? Should I be learning
Lilypond instead?
