Vince Del Vecchio skryf:
>
> 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?
>
Yes. M-Tx manual Section 3.3.
> 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.)
>
You're not supposed to use "LA:" when the staff has no other lyrics.
M-Tx manual section 1.5, explanation of "auxiliary lyrics line".
: Change it to "L:" and it works.
> 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.)
>
a. They're supposed to.
b. No. I can't predict where the line breaks will come. Of course,
if you do all the line breaking yourself, you can also put the line
numbers in manually, e.g. "\llap{1.}~Oh".
> 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?
>
The line style is determined by the voice to which the lyrics belong.
M-Tx relies on musixlyr, which has extra features that you can access
via inline TeX. I don't know them well enough to advise.
> 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.
>
That's what I do too.
> I tried switching the text from alto to bass midstream, but the
> lyrics wouldn't line up vertically--offset by a few points. Ugh!
>
Vertical repositioning is very tricky because PMX makes the decisions.
Some control is possible but it remains a chore.
> 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?
>
See answer to 2.
> 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.
>
There is as yet no clean way to do this without inline TeX.
> 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}
>
You may also need to put in the space that they would have occupied,
because PMX thinks it is there and may rely on it to keep the systems
from interfering with each other. The command (LaTeX) is:
%%\renewcommand{\writebarno}{\rule{0pt}{12pt}}
In plain MusiXTeX you would do the same using \def.
Dirk
