The Duphly piece I mentioned in my last posting raised another interesting point. I told PMX to use 3 pages and 15 systems, and here's what came out: http://icking-music-archive.sunsite.dk/software/duphly/duph3.pdf
Look at the line on p.3 starting with bar 79. Pretty ugly, isn't it? But this IS what PMX's basic algorithm comes up with. The easy fix would be to go to 4 pages and 16 systems. But there's another option, i.e., trying to find a better set of linebreaks. There's an undocumented command-line option "-o" in PMX to do just that. It activates an iterative optimization scheme that tries to find the set of line breaks that leads to the least variation in the size of \elemskip among the systems. When I ran it on this example, still with 15 systems, it gave a >50% reduction in the root-mean-square variation of \elemskip: http://icking-music-archive.sunsite.dk/software/duphly/duphopt.pdf The option probably won't work if you have any forced linebreaks, which therefore means no movement breaks either. And there's also no way to preserve the new linebreaks for future runs, short of re-running the optimization or manually inserting them as forced linebreaks. In other words, it's not ready for prime-time, and at the moment I don't intend to upgrade it. But feel free to play with it as is. Another observation: When I use NS 4.7 with the acrobat plugin to view the above links, they look different (worse) than when I use NS to view the local copies of the SAME files. You can make the same comparison if you download and save the file. Any idea what's going on? --Don Simons _______________________________________________ TeX-music mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://sunsite.dk/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
