Veronica Brandt wrote:
> The Gregorio project has been using luatex for years now. That's for
> typesetting gregorian chant using a gregorian abc sort of input format. I
> haven't been looking at the internals, but from the outside it looks like
> a similar thing.
>
> >From the gabc format (roughly corresponding to .mtx) there's a
> separate program to turn that into a .tex file (very long sort of markup,
> much like musixtex) then include that music fragment into your main tex
> document.
>
> Not sure why they have the separate program to turn .gabc to .tex, but if
> that's necessary then looking more at just the MusixTex side might be the
> way to go. Make musixflx redundant first.
It takes an awful lot of C code (and in PMX, it's quite a lot of FORTRAN) to
translate those input files to TeX. I may well be wrong, but it looks to me
as though even LuaTeX doesn't look really suited to processing a file which
is fundamentally not a TeX file in its syntax. I expect you'd have a jump
through a lot of quite painful hoops to implement the pre-processors in
LuaTeX. That said, the similarities between Lua (which is not very familiar
to me yet) and JavaScript's "Good Parts"^{TM} (which are far too familiar to
me) suggest that if you can get to an un-TeX'd file input stream then you
perhaps you can get the pre-processors implemented directly in Lua. BUT...
musixflx.c - roughly 35KB of C sources and a (relatively) straightforward
piece of array manipulation (which is the only reason it was written in C in
the first place - TeX's handling of arrays is like programming a Turing
machine using blood instead of a pencil) serving one single purpose.
pmxab.for - roughly 750KB - a file pre-processor with a large number of
calculation algorithms for various different tasks. i.e. complex!
Additionally, there's probably only one person who can port it, unless there
are some other Fortan programmers floating around on this list.
Gregorio - similarly, roughly 750KB of sources. Similar argument. At least
it's written in C.
In other words, we're talking about porting a vast amount of code for the
pre-processors.
Eliminating the need for musixflx would be good - especially if the code can
be structured so that a Lua-scripted version of musixflx can still be used
on platforms with a normal Lua interpreter for systems without LuaTeX.
David
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