I'm just learning how to use M-Tx and have come up with a couple of
things I haven't been able to figure out how to do.
I tried to ask a couple of days ago, but my message bounced. In the
meantime, I've figured out a couple of answers, and I've come up with
a few new questions! Sorry this message is so long!
I'm typesetting a hymn in 4 parts, so the format is SATB (2 staves per
system), and there are five verses--every voice has the same words and
at the same times.
1) The refrain is after the verses and begins on a pickup note, i.e. in
the middle of a bar. I would like to switch from 5 lines of text to
1 line exactly at the start of the refrain, i.e. in the middle of
the bar. Is this possible?
2) When I change the inter-staff spacing with the "Space:" command,
a trailing hyphen in the lyrics of the last measure before the
space change disappears! Is there any way to prevent this?
(An example is below.)
3) If I put "1.", "2.", "3." etc. at the beginning of the lyrics, it
prints verse numbers.
a) Is there any way to get the numbers to line up with each other?
b) Is there any way to get them at the beginning of each system?
(Ideally, without needing to know how many bars are in a
given system, and, given the refrain, I probably also need
to be able to turn this off.)
4) Sometimes, some parts have moving notes (melisma) where other parts
have longer notes for the same words. I want a trailing underline
in the text if *any* part has melisma (extending to the rightmost
note in the melisma in any part), but M-Tx produces an underline only
if the alto part has a melisma. Is there a way to get the text to
match to a different part temporarily?
I mostly solved this by moving the L: lines to below the lines of
music, i.e. attaching them to the bass line, and using @^+3 to get
the text above the staff. Except in one spot, the bass line has
the "longest" melismas, so this works pretty well for me.
I tried switching the text from alto to bass midstream, but the
lyrics wouldn't line up vertically--offset by a few points. Ugh!
5) In the process of playing with moving lyrics from part to part, I
got some really strange results. If I label everything as "LA:",
some of the words start to come out in the wrong places! "LS:"
works (printing above the staff). In the example below, the
second word prints under the 6th beat rather than the 5th. Oddly
enough, the underscore ends in the right place, but then it starts
using hyphens to fill in the whitespace until it prints the "Oh".
If I add identical "LS:" lines, I get an "Ah" above the staff
(no "Oh", just hyphens for the last two notes) and nothing below
the staff at all! What have I done here?
6) In one or two spots in the hymn, one verse has two syllables and
another verse has only one. I want the verse with only one
syllable to have the trailing underline.
I figured this one out by looking at the source for an example in
the musixlyr manual. If there is a melisma only in the second of
five verses, for example, you say
\verses{,\beginmel,,,}\
before the note where the melisma starts and
\verses{,\endmel,,,}\
before the note where it ends.
7) I was looking for a way to turn off the measure numbers, or to get
measure numbers without boxes.
Werner helped me with this one, and I also found it in the musixtex
manual. To get rid of the bar numbers, it's
%%\nobarnumbers
For bar numbers without boxes, I used:
%%\def\writebarno{\eightbf\the\barno\barnoadd}
I also wanted to raise them a little higher off the staff:
%%\def\raisebarno{5\internote}
Any help appreciated!
The example for #2 and #5 is:
--------Cut-----------------------------
SA: Voices S,A; Vocal; Clefs G
Style: SA
Meter: 6/4
Bars/Line: 1
c0+ ( d4 e ) |
( a2 g4 a ) ( b c ) |
LA: Ah Oh-
Space: 6
d2 c0 ||
b2 c0 ||
LA: oh Ah.
--------Cut-----------------------------
-Vince Del Vecchio
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
