1. Christof Biebricher wrote:
parsingOn Fri, 5 Dec 2003, Dirk Laurie wrote:
M-Tx passes along everything that starts with a letter that it does not understand. Unfortunately, some PMX enhancements occur in things that M-Tx understands the way it was. M-Tx tries to extract the things it needs and keep the rest intact, but this becomes harder and harder to do.
In the case of slurs, M-Tx had the ( ) syntax before PMX, which at that stage did everything with s and t. So it thinks it understands those. It needs to parse them for vocal music, to decide what to do with melismas. But it would be easy to let M-Tx pass those through in instrumental music -- would that help?
Thank you, Dirk, for your comments.
In my opinion, the big improvement of M-Tx comes essentially for vocal
music.
I feel tempted to (re-)issue my proposal to 'merge' PMX and M-Tx such that PMX allows 'top-down' score notation along with its native 'bottom-up' order and preferably also some way of simplified lyrics editing like that of M-Tx
Therefore,
parsing of ( ) and { } will remain important for M-Tx. One could think
of retaining the
parsing and pass everything which comes after ( ) to PMX, because Don has
retained the s and t code (PS-slurs K treat t differently). But that would
conflict with the feature of invisible
slurs {~ }~, which I appreciate and use very often, although other
type-setters seem to use this nice feature rarely.
I use invisible slurs frequently for editing vocal polyphony scores. That feature would be obvious for a PMX/M-Tx merge!
Christian's example illustrates the problem that are caused by the fact that the slur signs have multiple interpretations. In vocal music, a slur indicates which notes belong to a syllable. One can nest ties within, but they cannot cross the vocal slur. In instrumental music, the same applies to phrasing slurs, but in accords the nesting of inner ( ) exceeds 1.
There are two possible remedies: 1) Only { } is parsed, ( ) is passed along to PMX. 2) Only the outmost ( ) or { } is parsed, the ones within are passed to PMX.
I would prefer 1, because in drafts slur errors belong to the most frequent ones. Both solutions leave out the possibility of using phrasing slurs in vocal music, but it is rarely used and in my opinion contradictory, because phrasing should be dictated by the text. Legato is -- and should be -- indicated in vocal music explicitly and not by slurs to avoid misinterpretations.
Olivier's answer yesterday to my question demonstrated that replacing the '( )' slur notation by the 's s' notation efficiently solves the nesting slur limitation problem (I've updated score and source accordingly). The only drawback with the 's s' notation is that ties thus notated will not be reflected in PMX MIDI output. If, however, an M-Tx update as outlined above is considered, then I support Cristof's suggestion. Furthermore prepmx must be able to distinct between vocal and instrumental contexts within one score.
2.
One of my purposes with typesetting the Laub Ritornelles is to test M-Tx/PMX features not relevant to early music which is my main typesetting interest. Among the problems I've encountered is that vertical and horizontal fine tuning of PMX ornaments such as staccato dots isn't fine grained enough for my needs. The ritornel 'S�de Narcisse' published today illustrates that, for example in bar 4 where I have vertically offset the RH staccato dots to positions above and below the beams. The PMX syntax allows fractionwise vertical offset, but typesetting result demonstrates that fraction values are rounded to integers before being applied. That prevents me from achieving equal distances between dots and beam. Furthermore pmxab accepts additional staccato dot horizontal offset arguments (eg. 'o.+2+.5'). But since I may enter arbitrary horizontal offset values without seing any visual effect I suppose they're simply ignored. That prevents me from aligning staccato dots with stems as I would like to do:-(
Bye -- Christian Mondrup, Computer Programmer Scandiatransplant, Skejby Hospital, University Hospital of Aarhus Brendstrupgaardsvej, DK 8200 Aarhus N, Denmark Phone: +45 89 49 53 01 - http://www.scandiatransplant.org
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