bradr@bartok.Sun.COM (Brad Rubenstein) (01/05/90)
My friend Joe M sent me this excerpt on A-R Music Engraver. Their phone number is 608-836-9000 (Madison, WI, USA). If anyone on the net has experience using their stuff, I'm sure we'd like to hear. Brad ----------------------------------------------------------------------- A-R Editions is a Publishing & Software house. They developed the "A-R Music Engraver" program for professional music publishing purposes. It was originally developed for a Data General computer as a text entry system, but was rewritten for a Sun Microsystems workstation. The Sun was chosen for its power and graphics, and there is no attempt planned to try to port the program to MacIntosh Computers, since they have much less processing power than practical to run the program. It is a WYSIWYG program with fully interactive editing. All entry and editing is from menus. The display is a full page display which can be either portrait or landscape. From the description, the program appears somewhat similar to Interleaf, Frame or SunWrite/Paint/Draw, but optimized for music notation. It is written in NeWS, and utilizes the sun high resolution monitor (1600 x 1280 pixels, rather than the 1152 x 900 pixels of the standard display.) A-R Editions developed the musical notation library using Classical European engraved notes and symbols, making the output look like what was published using the hand engraved dies of the European tradition. The user can use any of the provided notes or symbols, make his own, modify any of them, or have A-R Editions develop them for him. There are multiple fonts, which are the full set of the Mergenthaler text fonts as used for typesetting. Mergenthaler now also uses the music fonts developed by A-R Editions. Presently the program is passive, but A-R Editions is exploring writing a MIDI driver to enable output of the notation as MIDI data. It is available at this time. Its cost depends on application and use. ---Brad Rubenstein-----Sun Microsystems Inc.-----bradr@sun.com---