On Fri, Sep 23, 2011 at 05:48:26AM +0200, Don Simons wrote:
> 4. LaTeX has nothing to do with any of this. LaTeX is a special set of macros
> designed to supposedly make TeX easier to use to produce nice text documents.
> There is absolutely no requirement to use LaTeX together with MusiXTeX; in
> fact, it just complicates matters to the extent that you should NEVER use
> them together unless you have a REALLY good reason AND are a pretty advanced
> user already.
>
I agree, but let me dot some i's and stroke some t's.
- TeX is a typesetting program with particularly strong support for
mathematical typesetting, where exact two-dimensional positioning
is important. TeX is idiosyncratic but powerful, abstruse but
conceptually simple, huge but very well supported over almost 30 years.
There is nothing that TeX cannot do, but it is not user-friendly.
- TeX is also a customizable typesetting language that allows the user
to define his own special-purpose instructions for other pernickety
typesetting tasks, like music. Don Knuth (the author of TeX) writes
a special set of macros for every typesetting task he undertakes and
honestly expects other TeX users to be similary diligent. (Instead,
they prefer to abuse existing macro libraries.)
- MusiXTeX is a music typesetting program written in TeX. The need
for exact two-dimensional positioning is even more crucial than in
mathematics, extending to whole pages and even whole scores in which
a change made in one bar can affect decisions on the appearance of
every page. It's not user-friendly any more than TeX itself is,
which is why it's much nicer to use it indirectly via PMX.
- LaTeX is a markup language written in TeX, i.e. a language that
urges you to think abstractly about your document: not "indented"
but "quoted", not "italics" but "emphasized", not "large boldface
with open space above and below" but "section heading", etc.
It's user-friendly (well, compared to TeX it is) and equally well
supported, so it has become a de facto standard among scientists.
So you see, there are two conflicting tasks: typesetting, in which you
care about minute details of appearance; and markup, in which you say
broadly want you require and the program takes care of the rest.
If you mix MusiXTeX and LaTeX, the two pull against each other, and you
spend a lot of time compensating for the things LaTeX has done to your
document. The only case where it is useful to mix them, is when a
scientist who knows LaTeX well tries to write a document like the M-Tx
manual, which is in the first place a structured text document, but has
numerous small music inserts.
But it is even more idiomatic to do it as in the MusiXTeX manual, where
the author did what Knuth wanted and wrote his own special-purpose set
of macros for the purpose.
Dirk
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