On Wed, 20 Nov 2002, Don Simons wrote: > > As for the slur problem Andre has noted, I hadn't seen anything quite this > bad before. And I'm afraid Apl doesn't help...it only helps with ties > (Christian, did you see an improvement???). > > Even so, it was tricky to program. It breaks every linebreak tie into two > separate, ordinary ties. This remedies two "features" of the original design > that are not to my taste: (1) The first segment of the original ties has an > unusual shape; with "Apl" it is now just an ordinary tie, and (2) the second > segment started too far to the right for my taste; with "Apl" the starting > point of the second segment is moved to the left. > I reported the problems with the K slurs and ties previously. It does not apply only to line breaks, it also gives very unsactisfactory results if two notes that happen to be close together are tied. One might think that making the score less crowded would help, but often it would require to make the score ridiculously extended. The PS slurs are much better than the old fonts; however, I found it necessary in my revised version of the organ version of the Kunst der Fuge to make many adjustments of the slurs for the final version, after the line breaks were fixed. But for complex scores, cosmetic adjustements are required at quite many other positions also.
In this connection, I should mention a further difficulty that can lead to an unsactisfactory layout: If one has a complex score with only two or three bars per line, the line breaking algorithm surely can no longer be satisfactory if only full bars are possible. It would help a lot if a line break within a bar would be made possible, for instance by sort of a \goodbreak command. In a case of a Handel Organ concerto I was forced to divide the meter into half and remove later the superfluous \bar commands. The same difficulty also arises even for quite simple meter-less scores which are very common in Renaissance or early baroque music. In pmx a bar is then defined by the imput block; that makes adequate breaking into lines quite difficult. Furthermore, the bar sign at the end of the stave is wrong. The only remedy I found was to postedit the TeX-file generated by pmx. Did I overlook a feature here? The philosophy of the TeX approach is to give the computer the task of adjusting the layout. If too many manual adjustments of the layout are required, then the advantage over mouse-click typesetting is gone. But, as mentioned, problems usually only arise at quite complex scores. I was amazed that even the quite simple example that Andre has given makes this problem. I make use of pmx and M-Tx a lot; fortunately, problems of this kind were rare, but one is never fully satisfied... Christof _______________________________________________ TeX-music mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://sunsite.dk/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
