Hello friends.
Could anyone tell me what is going on? I use MusixTex but, I guess, in a
very simple way, actually, I use MusixTex inside Latex. I don't know nothing
about PMX or LuaTex etc; never heard about it. Could anyone tell me if
something good or bad is coming?
Regards,
Filipe
2010/11/16 Bernhard Lang <bernhard.l...@gmx.ch>
> Thanks Dirk to draw our attention to this new development. Such a major
> change--and it would be a major change--would perhaps also give opportunity
> to think about how to overcome some limitations to MusixTeX and friends
> which are due to its design. Quite some inline TeX coding could probably
> moved into the "primary language".
>
> Getting rid of a double pass system won't probably work because TeX itself
> relies on such mechanism. Typesetting is always recursive because some
> informations are not available before some important part of the typesetting
> has already been done. You can't for instance set page links before you have
> set all pages as to know what is going to be put on which page. But setting
> the links may also influence, at least on the scale of details, how a page
> or paragraph is set. The same is true for all the mutually aligned stuff in
> a score.
>
> The main reason for me for staying with MusixTeX (besides never to change
> something which is already up and running) is its outstanding graphical
> clearness concerning representation of rhythm. I think we cannot thank
> enough Don for implenting and maintaining PMX, which, as far as I can judge,
> does most of that miracle.
>
> Sometimes the limitation to 12 voices gets in the way and after being
> forced such way to use an alternative its always a pleasure to return what
> is graphically still the best being available. What is more, once used to
> the PMX/M-Tx language, setting a score in much faster than with any other
> system I know. There is as less overhead as possible though almost anything
> can be controlled.
>
> Bernhard
>
> On Nov 16, 2010, at 7:48 , Dirk Laurie wrote:
>
> >
> > Recently something has happened to TeX that should change the way we
> > are thinking. This is the fact that LuaTeX has reached Version 0.50.
> >
> > In theory, only people living on the bleeding edge use LuaTeX. There
> > is a warning in the Reference Manual:
> > Nothing is considered stable just yet. This manual therefore simply
> > reflects the current state of the executable. Absolutely nothing on
> > the following pages is set in stone. When the need arises, anything
> > can (and will) be changed without prior notice.
> >
> > In practice, the bare necessities are not likely to change after 0.50.
> > I refer to the TeX command \directlua and the Lua function tex.print.
> > \directlua takes one argument, a Lua script, which is executed
> > immediately.
> > tex.print takes one argument, a string, which is passed to TeX.
> > The net effect is that the command \directlua{...} acts much like a TeX
> > macro.
> >
> > Lua is a minimalist programming language: simple syntax, only eight
> > types (of which the casual user needs six: nil, boolean, number, string,
> > table, function), and 21 reserved words. All arithmetic is in IEEE
> > double precision. It has a string library with powerful pattern-matching
> > capability. It is just the sort of language that can easily translate
> > PMX-style notes into MusiXTeX macros, computing note and line spacing
> > as it goes along.
> >
> > LuaTeX gives access to all the power of Lua from inside a TeX document.
> >
> > Currently an M-Tx user relies on:
> > - A preprocessor written in Pascal, compiled to be a stand-alone
> > executable, which is different for every operating system
> > - PMX, which is written in Fortran, compiled etc, different etc
> > - musixflx, which is written in C, compiled etc, different etc
> >
> > I have on two occasions asked on this list whether anybody wants to
> > help me convert M-Tx to Python. Christian Mondrup convinced me that
> > we shouldn't, as outside the Unix world people don't already have Python
> > anyway.
> >
> > The objection does not apply to LuaTeX. All recent TeX distributions
> > have it, maybe at this stage only as an optional extra, but it is being
> > billed as the "next generation TeX engine".
> >
> > If we had LuaTex in 1992, musixflx could have been implemented in Lua
> > and there would be only one TeX pass.
> > If we had LuaTeX in 1996, PMX could have been implemented in Lua and
> > there would not have been pmxa and pmxb passes.
> > If we had LuaTeX in 1999, M-Tx could have been implemented in Lua and
> > there would not have been a prepmx pass.
> >
> > Now it is 2010 and we do have LuaTeX.
> >
> > We can go on as we used to: regard musixflx as cast in concrete, rely
> > on Don to keep maintaining PMX (nobody else except me, as far as I know,
> > has contributed even one line of Fortran code to it) and hope that
> someone
> > occasionally tweaks M-Tx to take account of some recent PMX feature (that
> > person is no longer me).
> >
> > Or we can gradually convert more and more of the functionality of these
> > packages into LuaTeX, thus taking advantage of the fact that the next
> > generation of TeX package writers will be fluent in it and will be able
> > to maintain the software. A single package luamusix.sty will do
> everything.
> >
> > I think the choice is obvious. Don't you?
> >
> > Dirk
> >
> > PS If you would like to try LuaTeX for yourself, and find the official
> > documentation a little daunting, you may like to read the story at
> >
> > http://dip.sun.ac.za/~laurie/luatex<http://dip.sun.ac.za/%7Elaurie/luatex>
> >
> >
> >
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>
>
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--
Prof. Filipe de Moraes Paiva,
http://geocities.ws/prof-fmpaiva<http://www.geocities.ws/prof-fmpaiva>,
prof.fmpa...@gmail.com , fmpa...@cbpf.br
Departamento de Física, Colégio Pedro II - U.E. Humaitá II
*VIBRO KAJ VIVO* (*numero 3*)
http://geocities.ws/prof-fmpaiva/vibrokajvivo<http://geocities.ws/prof-fmpaiva/vibrokajvivo/numero-2/numero-2.html>
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