All--

Several days ago I got a wonderful surprise from Luigi Cataldi. He had not
only translated the entire PMX manual into Italian (arguably THE language of
music :-), but had included many typeset musical examples, added a detailed
introduction on how to install all the necessary software, and another
section introducing M-Tx. I haven't yet put a link on the software page, but
here's one to a pdf that I made with Acrobat Distiller 4.0:

http://icking-music-archive.sunsite.dk/software/pmx/lcgpmx.pdf .

On my first try at distilling Luigi's .ps I quickly realized he had used
bitmapped fonts for the Italian text. After some scouring in CTAN I found a
postscript set of ec fonts. After several fruitless attempts to use MikTeX's
Windows-based download and installion program I installed them in MikTeX by
hand, refreshed the now much larger database, re-ran dvips and distiller,
and that cleared up most of the postscript font issue...when I use Acrobat's
Document Info to list the fonts, there are still a few Type 3 but it doesn't
tell me which ones and I haven't located them by eyeball. It's not a
show-stopper.

But the PDF has other more obvious flaws: in the musical examples the staff
lines do not all have the same weight on screen. Also, some of the boxes
around the tables sometimes come out looking ragged. So here's question #1:
Can anyone suggest how to fix this and make a better PDF? If you want to
experiment with Luigi's original sources, here's a link:

http://icking-music-archive.sunsite.dk/software/pmx/luigi.zip .

You'll see that he embedded all the examples in lcgpmx.tex as separate .eps
files. I haven't remade any of the eps's. Maybe there are some aspects of
that step that could be altered to improve the final result. I think Luigi
used postscript slurs. I hazily recall discussions about the options for
distilling that concluded that with postscript slurs the only option is
Acrobat Distiller. If that's all correct, then maybe there's no way to make
a better PDF.

Question #2: Would anyone be willing to translate at least the PMX section
of this back into English? I just never found the time or energy to include
typeset examples in my version of the manual, but Luigi's are a great
contribution. I don't think you need to know Italian to do this, just PMX.

--Don Simons

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