Johan Tufvesson wrote

>On Wed, 10 Mar 1999, Stefan Svensson wrote:

>> Third, there's a bug in PMX. When I create a volta with a whole rest
>>in
>> the first voice (i e the lowest voice), the volta and it's number is
>> misplaced, several points too low, interferring with the note system.
>>This
>> might, however, have some correlation with \raisevolta that I also
>>use.

>This is not related to your use of \raisevolta, since I have noticed it
>too. For me it has nothing to do with the first voice either, it happens
>every time I have a "rp" under a volta. I have not investigated which
>version of PMX this error was introduced (I use 1.43), but I know it
>used
>to work.
>
>Don, sorry for not reporting this bug earlier. I have had it in my queue
>for some time now...

No problem, Johan.  Good to see you're still around.  I'm not in the office
now and don't have a laptop, but I think I have already solved this bug in
my working, unreleased version of PMX.  I'll try to remember to check when I
get home, and I suppose I should get a new release out sometime soon.  The
reason I haven't is that I have been experimenting with an iterative
optimization scheme for line-breaking.  So far I've got a single binary
combining pmxa/b and the optimization works if there are no forced line
breaks.  I've been hoping to allow forced line breaks but the coding is
horribly complex...it would require repetitively restarting both pmxa and
pmxb (now subroutines) at some intermediate point of the input file, but
getting either one properly initialized is going to be a big project.

Also, Stefan Svensson asked about incorporating some jazz features.  I've
played some jazz myself so I could get interested in this.  It would help if
Stefan could send his macro package and some examples.  But it may take a
little while; on top of the optimization coding dilemma, for the next 1.5
weeks I'll be tied up with organizing, practicing for, and presenting my 8th
annual Bach Birthday Bash, a baroque chamber concert in my house with 3
friends (2 from out of town, one from out of the country).

Stefan also mentioned making PDF's of MusiXTeX scores.  I have looked into
this as well, and quickly came up against Acrobat's recognized inability to
make a decent screen image using bitmapped fonts (hard-copies come out
fine).  I briefly tried to mobilize the TeX gurus to create some scalable
(Postscript) versions of the MusiXTeX fonts, but this effort ground to a
halt owing partly to disinterest on the part of MusiXTeX's esteemed creator
(The TeX gurus were distressed by the large number of fonts involved, so
before they would proceed, they wanted assurances that their efforts would
in fact be incorporated into MusiXTeX).  Perhaps Stefan has thought about
this problem or maybe even solved it.

Meanwhile, happy PMX'ing :-)

--Don Simons

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