MusiXTeX
Encyclopedia
MusiXTeX is a suite of open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 music engraving
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 for publication. Plate engraving, the process the term...

 macros and fonts that allow music typesetting in TeX
TeX
TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....

.

History

Macros for typesetting music in TeX
TeX
TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....

 first appeared in 1987 (MuTeX) 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.

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.

External links

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