Federico Garcia wrote:
Adam and all,
I had the same intuition as you seem to have had: TeX would seem the best
fit for non-standard music notation. Well, MusiXTeX is absolutely the worst.
Finale and Sibelius make every exception a painful process, but at least you
can do them! For any exception in MusiXTeX, you have to go read and modify
the TeX program itself---way too hard for what it's worth.
You (and music typesetters in general) could have a look at
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77garcia.pdf (an article with
some comments on these issues) and after that at
http://www.fedegarcia.net/TeX/TeXmuse.html.
Between Finale and Sibelius, there's not many criteria (they are different,
but ultimately the same; it's like WordPerfect vs. Word). Sibelius has been
colonizing everything: more and more publishers are requiring the pieces to
be typeset with it to be considered, for example. If you are new to both,
the most practical choice is probably Sibelius. But I keep using Finale
because that's what I learned and don't want to learn something new.
As pointed out in other postings GNU Lilypond is an alternative to
MusiXTeX as text based engraving software. Lilypond _is_ indeed
powerful, but IMHO rather complicated to use. There are, however, other
text based alternatives which you may find links to in the 'Music
Notation' section of the web site 'Sound & MIDI Software For Linux',
http://linux-sound.org/.
For some of my own editions I use MUP
(http://www.arkkra.com/doc/mupfeat.html) which offers rich features,
incl. a drawing interface for generating symbols etc for a modest
license of $29. Among the freeware alternatives I would specifically
mention 'PMW' (http://www.quercite.com/pmw.html) and the Abc
implementation 'abcm2ps'. In the AbcPlus project
(http://abcplus.sourceforge.net/) abcm2ps is coupled with a powerful
preprocessor 'abcpp'
--
Christian Mondrup, Sheet Music Editor
WIMA: Werner Icking Music Archive
http://icking-music-archive.org/
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