I notice I've been bitching a lot lately about what _isn't_ in M-Tx and Pmx. So it's time to express my appreciation for them being there _at all_. When I started out printing music, I did everything by hand with a #1 pencil on composition paper. Didn't take too long, but the printed results looked like s---. Then I started using a desktop publishing program.(*) I made my notes out of circles and lines and arcs.(+) The results looked really nice but it took me most of a day to set one line of music. I discovered I could cut down on the redrawing time if I captured my notes into bitmaps, and a friend sent me a copy of Adobe Sonata font that I captured into prettier notes and "real" clefs. But it still took over 2 hours per line of music. Then came MusiXTex. All of a sudden I could type my music in. This cut my time to about 1 hour/line. Now I have M-Tx. I can set an entire page in 1-2 hours. Life is grand. Thank you, Dirk Laurie and Don Simons and Daniel Taupin. Thank you from the bottom of my heart! (*) Hey, when all you have is a hammer.... (+) Yes, the noteheads should be slanted ellipses and the flags on quavers etc. should be fairly complex shapes, but I couldn't get them quite right and besides, version 3 of FrameMaker didn't do slanted ellipses. I had to approximate everything with joined- together parts of orthogonal ellipses. And you should have seen my clefs made of a bunch of elliptical and circular arcs. Or more accurately, be glad you didn't see them.
