Typesetting music in TeX
In the early days, a simple music package called MuTeX was
written by Angelika Schofer and Andrea Steinbach, which demonstrated
that music typesetting was possible; the package was very limited, and is
hardly ever used nowadays. Daniel Taupin took up the baton, and
developed MusicTeX, which allows the typesetting of polyphonic and
other multiple-stave music; MusicTeX remains available, but is most
definitely no longer recommended.
MusicTeX has been superseded by its successor MusiXTeX, which is
a three-pass system (with a processor program that computes values for
the element spacing in the music), and achieves finer control than is
possible in the unmodified TeX-based mechanism that MusicTeX
uses. Daniel Taupin’s is the only version of MusiXTeX currently
being developed (the original author, Andreas Egler, had an
alternative version, but he is now working on a different package
altogether).
Input to MusixTeX is extremely tricky stuff, and Don Simons’
preprocessor pmx is the preferred method of creating input
for Taupin’s version. Pmx greatly eases use of
MusixTeX, but it doesn’t support the full range of MusixTeX’s
facilities directly; however, it does allow in-line MusixTeX code
in pmx sources.
Dirk Laurie’s M-Tx allows preparation of music with lyrics;
it operates “on top of” pmx
Another simple notation is supported by abc2mtex; this is a
package designed to notate tunes stored in an ASCII format
(abc
notation). It was designed primarily for folk and traditional
tunes of Western European origin (such as Irish, English and Scottish)
which can be written on one stave in standard classical notation, and
creates input intended for MusicTeX. However, it should be
extendable to many other types of music.
Digital music fans can typeset notation for their efforts by using
midi2tex, which translates MIDI data files into
MusicTeX source code.
There is a mailing list (TeX-music@icking-music-archive.org)
for discussion of typesetting music in TeX; it mostly covers
MusixTeX and related systems. To subscribe, use
http://icking-music-archive.org/mailman/listinfo/tex-music/
An alternative (free) means of embedding music examples into (La)TeX
documents is Lilypond. Lilypond is
(at heart) a batch music typesetting system with plain text input that
does most of its work without TeX. Lilypond’s input syntax is far
less cryptic than is MusixTeX’s, and it handles much more stuff
automatically, yielding the same or better quality with less effort.
Lilypond can also produce basic MIDI output.
- abc2mtex
- support/abc2mtex (gzipped tar, browse)
- M-Tx
- support/mtx (gzipped tar, browse)
- midi2tex
- support/midi2tex (gzipped tar, browse)
- musictex
- macros/musictex (gzipped tar, browse)
- musixtex (Taupin’s version)
- macros/musixtex/taupin (gzipped tar, browse)
- musixtex (Egler’s version)
- macros/musixtex/egler (gzipped tar, browse)
- mutex
- macros/mtex (gzipped tar, browse)
- pmx
- support/pmx (gzipped tar, browse)
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=music