Prompted by my question about conditional double posting of irregular meters, Werner
expressed his bewilderment as why I do not use PMX, so I thought about it, and here is
what I came up with:
PMX is yet another piece of software to get, make work, and learn how to use.
I am (in priciple) weary about software piles: TeX, LaTeX, MusiXTeX, PMX, (M-Tx) seems
high; one broken piece and the tower tumbles.
I already have 321 hymn tunes in MusiXTeX
(http://users.uniserve.com/~mlhansen/hymnal.html); I suppose I could write a Perl
script translating the MusiXTeX to PMX and then have PMX translate it back again...
When people discuss PMX (or M-Tx) on this mailing list, the trouble is usually how to
overcome some limitation of PMX (/M-Tx) by using in-line MusiXTeX code or post-editing
the MusiXTeX file made by PMX. I prefer to know MusiXTeX (and LaTeX and plain old
TeX) well enough to just stay there.
So far I have only come across one feature, conditional double posting of irregular
meters, which PMX can do (easily) while it seems impossible in "beautiful" MusiXTeX
code. (I do not blame PMX for using hard line breaks; if you use PMX, it is the PMX
code that should be beautiful, not necessarily the generated MusiXTeX code.)
Regards,
Mogens
