[pdftex] Music for pdfTeX?

[Christophe Declercq]

Hi, Magnus!

> De : Magnus Lie Hetland <mlh at idi.ntnu.no>
> A : pdfTeX <pdftex at tug.org>
> Objet : [pdftex] Music for pdfTeX?
> Date : mercredi 27 juin 2001 17:47
> 
> 
> Basically, I want to typeset some simple (monophonic)
> music in pdfLaTeX, and am wondering how to do that.
> 
> I have looked at MusiXTeX, which looks wonderful,
[...]

Yes, MusiXTeX is wonderful but difficult to use. To make things easier,
you can use a pre-processor like M-Tx (see
http://icking-music-archive.sunsite.dk/musixtex/software/mtx/).

A problem with MusiXTeX is that you will get Type III fonts which are
badly rendered in Acrobat Reader.

A good idea would be to try the ABC language: a much simpler to use
(actually, it began its life in abc2mTeX, a pre-processor for MusicTeX)
but yet powerful language created by Chris Walshaw
(http://www.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/). 

There are tools to convert it to PostScript, from which you can easily
get PDF files to use with pdfLaTeX. For example, try 'abcm2ps' by
Jean-François Moine (http://moinejf.free.fr/).

Hope it helps.

Christophe