Re: [SLUG] Music Editor/Notator

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 01, 2000 at 09:47:29AM +1100, Ken Yap wrote:
> >MusicTex appeals as a long term way of entering all the music I play and
> >keeping Tex skills current.
> 
> I've tried MusixTeX (I think this is more recent than MusicTeX) and had
> more or less the same experience as Malcolm. I should warn you that
> while your resulting sheets will look very professional, you'll end up
> having to upgrade your TeX skills and lose some hair in the process.

Oops ... my bad. :-(

I was indeed using the later package (MusixTeX). And there is a good
reason for this: typesetting music is incredibly expensive in TeX terms
-- it really stresses the limits on the number of words and boxes that
you have available and is quite memory intensive to boot. This placed a
fairly small upper limit on the size of the music you could create in a
single document.

The latter package was written to optimise some of this, but it took the
form of "add more features in the available space", rather than "reduce
the amount of space required". Also, the handling of beams and slurs is
much better in MusixTeX than in MusicTeX.

Of course, this is all "value add knowledge", since Terry has explained
his situation and none of my comments have any bearing on that. However,
when he comes to publishing his collection of symphonies to the birds
these may become issues. :-)

Cheers,
Malcolm

-- 
Malcolm Tredinnick            email: malcolm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
CommSecure Pty Ltd

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