Last November, Dirk Laurie suggested that we should be porting the M-Tx/PMX/musixtex/musixflx toolchain to LuaTeX. I won't review his arguments here, but I'm pleased to report that Nikhil Helferty, a student here, has successfully converted musixflx.c (version 0.83.3) to musixflx.lua (version 0.83.3.luaN, currently N=1). This is available by anonymous ftp from here:
ftp://linus.cs.queensu.ca/musixflx/musixflx.lua It should be functionally identical to musixflx.c (up to round-off error). It's been tested on hundreds of examples but there may be bugs lurking in rarely-exercised parts of the code so please test it on your most complex and unusual scores, and report problems to me (attach problematic .mx1 files). Usage: musixflx.lua is a lua script and so is used essentially as follows: lua musixflx.lua basename This requires a lua interpreter; for example, from here: http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaBinaries Or you can use texlua, which is included in the basic LuaTeX package in most modern TeX distributions. LuaTeX is a version of TeX that supports use of lua scripting within a TeX document; texlua is just a lua interpreter. If your operating system supports the use of #! in the first line of a script, you can edit the path to your lua interpreter and simply use musixflx.lua basename Or modify the paths in your favorite multi-pass processing script, or set up a symbolic link or shortcut, etc., etc. What's it For? musixflx.lua has no advantage over traditional musixflx except that it should now be possible to merge the conventional three-pass tex-musixflx-tex processing (using a platform-dependent musixflx binary) into a single multi-platform LuaTeX pass. That's the aim, though we're not there yet; it seems prudent to get all the bugs out of musixflx.lua before trying to integrate it into musixtex.tex. Bob Tennent ------------------------------- [email protected] mailing list If you want to unsubscribe or look at the archives, go to http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
