Thanks Dirk to draw our attention to this new development. Such a major
change--and it would be a major change--would perhaps also give opportunity to
think about how to overcome some limitations to MusixTeX and friends which are
due to its design. Quite some inline TeX coding could probably moved into the
"primary language".
Getting rid of a double pass system won't probably work because TeX itself
relies on such mechanism. Typesetting is always recursive because some
informations are not available before some important part of the typesetting
has already been done. You can't for instance set page links before you have
set all pages as to know what is going to be put on which page. But setting the
links may also influence, at least on the scale of details, how a page or
paragraph is set. The same is true for all the mutually aligned stuff in a
score.
The main reason for me for staying with MusixTeX (besides never to change
something which is already up and running) is its outstanding graphical
clearness concerning representation of rhythm. I think we cannot thank enough
Don for implenting and maintaining PMX, which, as far as I can judge, does most
of that miracle.
Sometimes the limitation to 12 voices gets in the way and after being forced
such way to use an alternative its always a pleasure to return what is
graphically still the best being available. What is more, once used to the
PMX/M-Tx language, setting a score in much faster than with any other system I
know. There is as less overhead as possible though almost anything can be
controlled.
Bernhard
On Nov 16, 2010, at 7:48 , Dirk Laurie wrote:
>
> Recently something has happened to TeX that should change the way we
> are thinking. This is the fact that LuaTeX has reached Version 0.50.
>
> In theory, only people living on the bleeding edge use LuaTeX. There
> is a warning in the Reference Manual:
> Nothing is considered stable just yet. This manual therefore simply
> reflects the current state of the executable. Absolutely nothing on
> the following pages is set in stone. When the need arises, anything
> can (and will) be changed without prior notice.
>
> In practice, the bare necessities are not likely to change after 0.50.
> I refer to the TeX command \directlua and the Lua function tex.print.
> \directlua takes one argument, a Lua script, which is executed
> immediately.
> tex.print takes one argument, a string, which is passed to TeX.
> The net effect is that the command \directlua{...} acts much like a TeX
> macro.
>
> Lua is a minimalist programming language: simple syntax, only eight
> types (of which the casual user needs six: nil, boolean, number, string,
> table, function), and 21 reserved words. All arithmetic is in IEEE
> double precision. It has a string library with powerful pattern-matching
> capability. It is just the sort of language that can easily translate
> PMX-style notes into MusiXTeX macros, computing note and line spacing
> as it goes along.
>
> LuaTeX gives access to all the power of Lua from inside a TeX document.
>
> Currently an M-Tx user relies on:
> - A preprocessor written in Pascal, compiled to be a stand-alone
> executable, which is different for every operating system
> - PMX, which is written in Fortran, compiled etc, different etc
> - musixflx, which is written in C, compiled etc, different etc
>
> I have on two occasions asked on this list whether anybody wants to
> help me convert M-Tx to Python. Christian Mondrup convinced me that
> we shouldn't, as outside the Unix world people don't already have Python
> anyway.
>
> The objection does not apply to LuaTeX. All recent TeX distributions
> have it, maybe at this stage only as an optional extra, but it is being
> billed as the "next generation TeX engine".
>
> If we had LuaTex in 1992, musixflx could have been implemented in Lua
> and there would be only one TeX pass.
> If we had LuaTeX in 1996, PMX could have been implemented in Lua and
> there would not have been pmxa and pmxb passes.
> If we had LuaTeX in 1999, M-Tx could have been implemented in Lua and
> there would not have been a prepmx pass.
>
> Now it is 2010 and we do have LuaTeX.
>
> We can go on as we used to: regard musixflx as cast in concrete, rely
> on Don to keep maintaining PMX (nobody else except me, as far as I know,
> has contributed even one line of Fortran code to it) and hope that someone
> occasionally tweaks M-Tx to take account of some recent PMX feature (that
> person is no longer me).
>
> Or we can gradually convert more and more of the functionality of these
> packages into LuaTeX, thus taking advantage of the fact that the next
> generation of TeX package writers will be fluent in it and will be able
> to maintain the software. A single package luamusix.sty will do everything.
>
> I think the choice is obvious. Don't you?
>
> Dirk
>
> PS If you would like to try LuaTeX for yourself, and find the official
> documentation a little daunting, you may like to read the story at
> http://dip.sun.ac.za/~laurie/luatex
>
>
>
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