bill jehle wrote:
> Hi;
> This is kind of off the wall and I have no idea how
> difficult it would be, but has anyone written a
> layout file to support a document class for musixtex?
I like the idea. I just discovered MusixTeX over the weekend, and spent a night
writing a package to simplify entry of lute tablatures. It's a powerful tool, and
it begs for a WYSIWYM interface just like TeX/LaTeX did.
However, I don't see how LyX could help, at least not without substantial changes
to the UI. As it is, I think you would have to put everything into LyX as TeX or
LaTeX literals, and thus you would not see them as music until you generated the
PostScript. But that's exactly what happens when you use a text editor to do it,
so LyX would not be contributing much. (An important exception being when you are
writing a document that is primarily text, but which happens to contain snatches
of music. If I ever had cause to do that, I would surely try to find a way to use
LyX for the text and MusixTeX for the music.)
In principle you could hack the LyX UI to support a WYSIWYM mode for music similar
to the one that now exists for math, but I suspect that we are talking about a
very substantial amount of hackage. An alternative would be to write a custom
music setting program such as the embryonic Denemo front end for LilyPond
(http://denemo.sourceforge.net/), or just modify Denemo to support MusixTeX output
the way LyX supports LaTeX.
Naturally, I'd prefer WYSIWYM support for typesetting both music and text in a
single application, but I don't think any such thing currently exists. Surely not
for free.
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
