There should be something for which Panmus would be a logical name. Maybe there is, I just don't know about it.
Let me start by describing Pandoc, which is not a dream, but a reality, driven by one superman who does the design and coding and an active mailing-list of users (approximately two new topics per day). Pandoc is a system for converting some precisely specified text-like input format, at present any of six, to a convenient output format, at present any of more than twenty, including all its input formats, as well as PDF via LaTeX. Pandoc has a favourite input format: an extended version of Markdown, the original text-like markup language; and a favourite ouput format: HTML. Pandoc's great strength is its modular design. At the centre sits a Haskell data structure, which has been designed with great logical clarity (the creator is a philosophy professor) to provide abstractions for features that a document is allowed to contain. The text serialization of this structure as valid Haskell source code is the Native format of Pandoc, which is one of its input formats. I use Native loosely to mean not only the serialization but also the internal data structure itself. All input formats have a Reader that converts them to Native; all output formats have a Writer that converts Native to them. How does this relate to us? 1. Pandoc can produce beautiful documents from input source created by a text editor. 2. TeX is the route taken to PDF output. 3. The basic "reader -> internal structure -> writer" design is present in the software we use. These are basically our goals too. Where we fall down is that our internal structures (Fortran for PMX, Pascal for M-Tx) are not sufficiently well modularized that we can tell someone who wants to write say an ABC reader or a MIDI writer what to do so that we can just plug it in. We need something which can read PMX, M-Tx or ABC; convert it to a central structure; from that central structure write PMX, M-Tx, ABC, MusiXTeX, Lilypond, MIDI, etc. That central structure obviously must be a Lua table, giving us a Native format of our own, and the readers and writers must be written in Lua. That way, getting it into TeX will be easy. (BTW, LuaTeX has recently reached version 0.80.) We also need a favourite input format (basically the common subset of PMX and M-Tx, with extensions that will only reveal themselves as the design of the central stucture solidifies) and a favourite output format (PDF or Postscript). Is Panmus a proposal? Or just a dream? I don't know. Dirk ------------------------------- [email protected] mailing list If you want to unsubscribe or look at the archives, go to http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
