MusiXTeX is a suite of
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
music engraving
Music engraving is the art of drawing music notation at high quality for the purpose of mechanical reproduction. The term ''music copying'' is almost equivalent—though ''music engraving'' implies a higher degree of skill and quality, usually f ...
macros and fonts that allow music typesetting in
TeX
Tex, TeX, TEX, may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname
* Tex Earnhardt (1930–2020), U.S. businessman
* Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer ...
, released under the
GPL-2.0-or-later license.
History
Macros for typesetting music in
TeX
Tex, TeX, TEX, may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname
* Tex Earnhardt (1930–2020), U.S. businessman
* Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer ...
first appeared in 1987 (
MuTeX
In computer science, a lock or mutex (from mutual exclusion) is a synchronization primitive that prevents state from being modified or accessed by multiple threads of execution at once. Locks enforce mutual exclusion concurrency control policies, ...
) and were limited to one-staff systems.
In 1991, Daniel Taupin created
MusicTeX, whose macros allowed the production of systems with multiple staves, but which presented a few problems in controlling the horizontal positioning of notes. MusicTeX used a one-pass compilation.
In 1997 the positioning problems were corrected in MusiXTeX, which includes the external application musixflx to control the horizontal distances. This new module requires a three-pass compilation: TeX, musixflx and TeX again. MusiXTeX requires
ghostscript
Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization of documents in these language,, the display or prin ...
.
Three-pass system
When compiling a TeX source file named ''file.tex'', a ''file.mx1'' is generated, containing information about the distances between staves and bar lengths. This file is processed by the program musixflx, which determines the distances between notes for each beat and writes them in ''file.mx2'', which is used in compiling the final TeX file. Any changes in the score that affect the horizontal distances require ''file.mx2'' to be deleted and all three passes to be performed again; otherwise, only one compilation in TeX is required.
Spin-offs
In 1996, Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen, who were working in the MusiXTeX PreProcessor (MPP) project since the previous year, decided to create a new music engraving program loosely based on MusiXTeX's concepts, named
LilyPond
LilyPond is a computer program and file format for music engraving. One of LilyPond's major goals is to produce scores that are engraved with traditional layout rules, reflecting the era when scores were engraved by hand.
LilyPond is cross-pla ...
. LilyPond 1.0 was released on 31 July 1998, highlighting the development of a custom music font, Feta, and the complete separation of LilyPond from MusiXTeX.
PMX is a preprocessor for MusiXTeX written by Don Simons.
See also
*
List of music software
This is a list of software for creating, performing, learning, analyzing, researching, broadcasting and editing music. This article only includes software, not services.
For streaming services such as iHeartRadio, Pandora (service), Pandora, Prime ...
*
List of TeX extensions
A list is a set of discrete items of information collected and set forth in some format for utility, entertainment, or other purposes. A list may be memorialized in any number of ways, including existing only in the mind of the list-maker, bu ...
References
External links
MusiXTeX and Related Software
TeX
Scorewriters
Scorewriters for Linux
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