Dear all. During the last few weeks I've been experimenting with the plain TeX macro collection PSTricks for 'drawing' music typesetting symbols.
For these experiments I've been working with a lute tablature made by Vincenzo Galilei on a (now lost) 5 part composition by Alessandro Striggio - both outstanding personalities in late 16th & early 17th century Florentine music life. My typesetting contains a transcription of the tablature into 'ordinary' music notation along with Galilei's original lute tablature. For the latter Ronald Gelten's guitar tablature macros TABdefs (available in our software section) has offered the needed wide 6 line tableture staff plus fret marks. Apart from that, however, for Italian style lute tablature there is also needed some special duration symbols to be printed above the tablature staff. I soon realized that MusiXTeX's line drawing facilities will not allow me to generate these facilities. Then I was left with creating the missing symbols as fonts which requires METAFont which is highly above my capacity or with drawing them directly with postscript. And this is what I ended up with by means of the macro collection PSTricks coming both with teTeX and MIKTeX. Among the nice features of these macros is that size parameters may be given in TeX dimensions like \internote so that the size of the symbols drawn grow and shrink with the chosen of \musicsize. IMHO the main perspective of my experiments is that PSTricks allows the typesetter to draw (almost) anything anywhere within a score like is the case with the corresponding drawing facilities of the music typesetter MUP. A minor drawback - which PSTricks shares with PSslurs - is that they don't work with pdftex and dvipdfm. For best result pdf a type 1 postscript score should be made for generating pdf with ps2pdf. I've made my sources available with the published score found in http://icking-music-archive.sunsite.dk/ByComposer/Striggio.html Bye -- Christian Mondrup, Computer Programmer Scandiatransplant, Skejby Hospital, University Hospital of Aarhus Brendstrupgaardsvej, DK 8200 Aarhus N, Denmark Phone: +45 89 49 53 01 - http://www.scandiatransplant.org _______________________________________________ TeX-music mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://sunsite.dk/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
