I'm now educated about "export"ing environment variables in Linux...thanks to the collective and individual experience of our distinguished list. I've confirmed that it works in RH Linux 9.0. So it appears that my initial proposal for the configuration file will work in both Windows and Linux systems. I also appreciate all the suggestions for enhancements and modifications.
After thinking about all of this, here's how I now plan to proceed (and of course I welcome further comments). I'm going to start calling these things "include" files rather than "configuration," because after all they're just arbitrary sets of ordinary PMX commands. There will be two kinds of such files, global and normal. The global one (there can only be one) will operate exactly as I outlined earlier. It will be named pmx.mod. An environment variable PMXMODDIR (case-sensitive in Linux) will have to contain the path to the file. If PMXMODDIR is defined and if the file exists, then its contents will be added (in a virtual sense) to every .pmx file right after the setup data. The contents will be syntax-checked, and echoed to the screen and to the .pml file. True, there will be no record in the .pmx file of what was included in this way, but there will be in the .pml, and it will have required two specific actions by the user---defining PMXMODDIR and creating pmx.mod---to initiate this activity. The normal include files will be allowed at the beginning of any input block. The only thing a user will need to do to read one in will be to insert a pmx command. The effect will be exactly like \input in TeX (except I double if they can be nested). The argument of the command will be the name of the file including any necessary path information. For this type of include file, there will be a record in the .pmx file. Anyone who doesn't like the lack of traceablity of pmx.mod can accomplish the same purpose with a normal include file entered right after the setup data. Those who suggested multiple such files can use this method to select which one they want in each particular case. The syntax that comes to mind is AR[filename] (R stands for read; "I" is already taken, either as an option to "A" or as a stand-alone command). It's not too late to change this if anyone has a better suggestion. I didn't want to create a default path to pmx.mod because (1) that would only have required one positive action (creating pmx.mod) to initiate, making it more likely that a user would lose track of things, and (2) that would be difficult to make compatible across different OS's. --Don Simons _______________________________________________ Tex-music mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://icking-music-archive.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
