HowardGilbert wrote:
> Hi,
>
> A friend, who has seen the superb parts I can produce, is very
> interested in acquiring and using PMX and MusixTeX. He uses the Windows
> OS whereas I am Linux based. Hence I not sure how to advise on what he
> needs.
>
> I assume he needs to get musixtex.zip and pmx.zip from
> www.gmd.de/Misc/Music; is this correct?
Yes, this is the base music typesetting stuff to be used together with some
flavour of TeX. Your friend should also consider installing the pmx
preprocessor M-tx that a.o. makes adding lyrics straight forward.
> What else does he need? I
> think my system needs TeTeX which (I think) is not a standard part of
> the Windows package. I also use dvi and Ghostview to see my output what
> do Windows users use?
For win9x and NT the MiKTeX TeX implementation ( http://www.miktex.de ) is
an obvious choice. The installation is well documented and straight forward
to perform. The MiKTeX yap dvi previewer is fully sufficient for viewing and
printing the MusiXTeX results. MiKTeX like other TeX implementations also
contains the dvips utility to generate postscript files from dvi output. For
handling postscript files he'll need the win32 version of ghostscript and
gsview (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/new27.html).
> Is there Windows freeware or shareware to convert
> MusixTex output to MIDI for playback?
To my best knowledge, no. If midi is a must your friend should consider the
official GNU music typesetting environment LilyPond
(http://www.cs.ruu.nl/people/hanwen/lilypond/) but also be aware that it is
under heavy construction and therefore subject to frequent changes. There
is a win32 port pointed to from the LilyPond web pages, but it is several
releases - and bugfixes - behind the current release. The quality of
LilyPond typesetting is in my opinion not quitethat of MusiXTeX and friends.
> Any help from will be most
> welcome.
>
> Thankyou,
> Best wishes,
> Howard.
> (A.H.Gilbert, Thornaby, North Yorkshire)
--
Christian Mondrup, Computer Programmer
Scandiatransplant, Skejby Hospital, University Hospital of Aarhus
Brendstrupgaardsvej, DK 8200 Aarhus N, Denmark
Phone: +45 89 49 53 01
