Klarinet Archive - Posting 000547.txt from 2005/03

From: Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] music notation software (rather OT)
Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 05:12:03 -0500

Anne Bell wrote:

> My brother used TeX or some derivative (I don't know why I think it
> was something like LaTex...just being punny probably....) to typeset
> his Thesis and suggested I look into MusiXTex.

It almost certainly was LaTeX. LaTeX is a set of TeX macros that make
TeX more intuitive and user-friendly, and is used widely for typesetting
academic material (particularly science papers). Currently I'm writing
my own thesis with it... ;-)

(By the way, TeX is pronounced "tech"---tau, epsilon, chi;-)

I did check out MusiXTeX one time---actually I think this is just one of
several variants of TeX-based music typesetting macros. I didn't get
very far with it as it is *very* far from user-friendly; I think you
would need to be a pretty good "TeXpert" to get much out of it. For
someone like me who is only used to LaTeX and does not have much
expertise in the nuts and bolts of TeX itself (which are much more
complicated and which LaTeX exists to gloss over), it was pretty
difficult to get into.

I do remember hearing that there exists an open-source WYSIWYG program
which bases itself on TeX, but it may only be available for Linux.

-- Joe

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