I recently asked whether dvipdfm/musix.map could be removed. As part of the resulting discussion (off-line), Don and Reinhard Kotucha had the following exchange (forwarded with their permission):
>| > I personally have a hard time getting very worked up >| > about any of this. I don't ever use either dvipdfm or dvipdfmx >| > myself. Not only do I have no problem at all with first making a >| > .ps, then a .pdf if needed, but my understanding is that neither >| > dvipdfm nor dvipdfmx processes postscript slurs. If that is the >| > case, it astounds me that any musixtex user would ever use them, >| > since the bitmapped slurs have various drawbacks and limitations >| > (summarized and illustrated in musixdoc) that are all overcome by >| > Type K postscript slurs. >| >|Well, the file psslurs.pro can indeed be used with dvips only. >|However, another, more versatile way to create slurs on-the-fly is to >|use LuaTeX's built-in Lua engine in order to calculate the shapes of >|the slurs, and the pgf package in order to insert graphic elements >|into the output file. This would work with plain TeX, LaTeX, and >|ConTeXt, and could produce PostScript and PDF, and with tex4ht even >|SVG. The Lua code would be much easier to maintain than the PostScript >|code in psslurs.pro. I think Reinhard's suggestion is well worth exploring. In another domain, I re-wrote a pstricks-based package to an equivalent one based on pgf so that users would not have to depend on dvips/ps2pdf processing, which is increasingly rare in the larger TeX world. Bob T. P.S. BTW, Don's reference to "bitmapped slurs" is misleading. He meant *font*-based slurs, independent of whether the fonts are bit-mapped or type 1. "Postscript slurs" are based on Postscript curves, not type 1 fonts. ------------------------------- [email protected] mailing list If you want to unsubscribe or look at the archives, go to http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
