elkies@ramanujan.harvard.edu (Noam Elkies) (12/17/90)
Archive-name: music/notation/musictex/1990-12-14 Archive: qed.rice.edu:/pub/musictex.tar.Z [128.42.4.38] Original-posting-by: elkies@ramanujan.harvard.edu (Noam Elkies) Original-subject: Re: Looking for a music typesetting processor Reposted-by: emv@ox.com (Edward Vielmetti) In article <1990Dec12.141603.7773@ircam.fr> fingerhu@ircam.fr (Michel Fingerhut) writes: >Da capo: > >1. "music: a troff preprocessor for printing music scores" -- > send email to ef@cs.nott.ac.uk. That's the person who sends it. Has anybody done this successfully? It looked interesting, so I e-mailed to ef@cs.nott.ac.uk a few weeks ago, and I have yet to get a reply. This *could* indicate that ef@cs.nott.ac.uk is swamped with such requests as a result of the previous annoucement to comp.music, but in that case there would usually be a "no more requests please, we're swamped" message posted to this newsgroup... >2. "MusicTeX : Using TeX to write polyphonic or instrumental music" > ftp from qed.rice.edu. This I did manage to get, and set up with the help of the local gurus. Unfortunately it only confirmed my guess that, while TeX is an excellent paradigm for a music notator, you don't want to actually build your notator on top of TeX as a set of macros. (That is, for practical use in printing music; for a master's thesis, which the original MuTeX was, it's a fine CS project.) Now if the visual quality of the output had been as high as we're used to with TeX, I might not mind having to learn how to translate a score into a convoluted sequence of arcane MusicTeX macros. But, after examining the printouts from a few of the demos, I don't believe it's worth the effort. Not only is the spacing amateurish (and the bizarre notion of shrinking the accidentals when the spacing gets too narrow doesn't help either), but the fonts themselves seem half-baked. While it's true that a convincing treble or C clef takes some work to design, surely making a quarter-note centered on the correct staff line or space, and with the stem tangent to the notehead, is a trivial METAFONT exercise; yet neither the noteheads nor the stems are properly aligned (all the noteheads are noticeably too high on the staff, and all the stems cut through their noteheads). I can only hope that the troff preprocessor does a significantly better job... --Noam D. Elkies (elkies@zariski.harvard.edu) Department of Mathematics, Harvard University