PMS - Qercus 281 - Finnybank

Whatever Happened to
Philip’s Music Scribe is a
program for typesetting
music that I originally
implemented in the early days of
Acorn’s 32-bit systems.
Where it all started
At the beginning of the 1980s I had
written some text typesetting software
for the then state-of-the-art daisywheel
printers, and later I adapted it for the
early, very expensive, laser printers.
Then in 1987 along came the Apple
LaserWriter, the first product to use
the PostScript page description
language.
This was revolutionary, because it was
a fully functional progamming
language with graphics capabilities
that also incorporated an impressive
font mechanism. I had been
wondering about the possibility of
typesetting music by computer, but
the lack of a convenient output device
had put me off. In the era before
digital output became common, other
people’s attempts to set music used
pen plotters, which were slow,
expensive, used special paper, and did
not produce particularly nice looking
output.
The arrival of digital typography
provided the opportunity to do very
much better. I realized that most
musical signs could be printed as
characters or combinations of
characters in a PostScript font, and so
the first thing I had to do was to create
such a font, containing notes, clefs,
rests, and so on. I also decided to
make characters for the stave lines on
which music is written, so that the
font mechanisms for controlling their
precise width and positioning could be
used.
Philip’s Music Scribe?
Shortly after that, the first version of
Philip’s Music Scribe was born. It was
written in BCPL and ran on the
University of Cambridge’s IBM
mainframe and also on Acorn’s first
32-bit operating system, Panos, which
ran on a Motorola 32016 processor
connected as a second processor to a
BBC Micro. (Later this combination
was packaged in a single box and
called the ‘Acorn Business Machine’.)
The program read a text input file that
encoded the music, and wrote out
PostScript that could be sent with my
personal font to an Apple LaserWriter.
The result was high-quality music
printed on standard A4 paper.
Screen preview was a problem. I
managed to make the program display
very crude music on a BBC micro
screen—enough to allow you to check
that you had put in the right notes,
but that was about the limit. Real
proof-reading had to be done using
the paper output.
The first ARM systems were also BBC
micro second processors, And then
came the first Archimedes, running an
operating system called Arthur, the
forerunner of RISC OS.
BCPL was available on these systems,
and porting my software gave no
problems. However, at this stage it
was still a command-line program.
The first users
Word of the existence of Philip’s Music
Scribe had got out, and I was
approached by a local music arranger
who wanted to buy a copy, and was
prepared to invest in an Archimedes in
order to run it. By this time, the Apple
Personal LaserWriter, priced under
£2,000 was available. I sold the first
copy in June 1988, with an A5 manual
that was 80 pages long. The feedback
after it had been used for some time
was interesting.
The user arranged a lot of early music
for performance, and had previously
written it all by hand. He hoped that
computer typesetting would save time.
In the event, he said it took about the
A program for typesetting music
by Philip Hazel
Qercus & 281 Celebrating 25 years of Acorn, BBC, and RISC OS computing 15

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14
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Philip’s Music Scribe
same time to create a musical score,
but the final output looked better, and
was of course much easier to correct.
The big gain came when he wanted
instrumental parts as well as a full
score, because these could be printed
more or less automatically, and be
guaranteed to match the score.
A number of other users bought
copies, having learned of the software
by word of mouth.
Conversion to a Wimp
application
In Arthur, the Wimp was somewhat of
an add-on to the command line, and
initially rather simple. However, it
rapidly developed to become the main
user interface to RISC OS, and along
with it came the outline font system,
and a fully functional C compiler and
library. At last there was the possibility
of displaying music properly on the
screen, so I undertook a complete
rewrite, in C, turning the program into
a proper Wimp application.
In order to do this, I had to create an
Acorn font from the PostScript font,
and for this I had a lot of help from
Richard Hallas, who tidied up many of
the crude outlines and provided
additional characters. The application
could now also output via any printer
driver as well as producing PostScript
directly, making it much more widely
useful. This version became available
in December 1992.
Sound output
The next big development was making
the music playable via the RISC OS
sound system. As my main interest
was in producing high quality printed
music, the playing was always aimed
at ‘proof- hearing’ rather than real
performance, and so was relatively
crude. Later, support for output via
MIDI was added.
Sound output
Other music typesetting
systems
There was a lot of interest in
typesetting music by computer around
this time, and several programs
(running on a variety of hardware and
operating systems) were available. The
Center for Computer Assisted
Research in the Humanities, located in
California, used to publish an annual
review of computing in music, and
they were in the habit of sending out
test pieces for the various software
systems to typeset. I contributed to
several editions, and was pleased to
see that my output was by no means
the worst looking.
For RISC OS, Sibelius was being
developed, and when it was released it
attracted a lot of attention. Philip’s
Music Scribe was eclipsed, but I was
not surprised, because for me this was
a hobby that helped pay for some of
my hardware, nothing more. Sibelius,
on the other hand, was developed as a
commercial product and had
appropriate investment and marketing.
I never used Sibelius, but I did hear of
comparisons from time to time. It
turns out that there are two kinds of
people who typeset music.
Composers, arrangers, and those who
just want to get something written for
a performance prefer a Sibelius-like
system, where the whole typesetting
job is almost entirely automatic, and
input can be done by dragging and
dropping on-screen, so that a lot of it
is intuitive. The other group of users
can best be described as ‘music
engravers’, people who are in the
business of producing pages for
publication. They want the maximum
possible control over exactly what is
placed where on the page, and they
are prepared to spend time learning
how to do it. Such people on the
whole seem to prefer a text input
system, where more control is
possible.
16 Celebrating 25 years of Acorn, BBC, and RISC OS computing Qercus & 281
p
Another reincarnation
For several years I did very little
development; bugs got fixed and a few
features were added, but nothing
significant. The last copy of Philip’s
Music Scribe was sold in June 1998,
almost 10 years to the day after the
first. The final (8th) edition of the
manual, at 301 pages long, was nearly
four times as big as the first edition.
The program had changed a lot in the
decade since I first released it.
I continued to supply updates to
existing users till the end of 2001. My
own use of the program was for
typesetting examples for music exams
and re-setting the occasional
porchestral
part that was too hard to
read. From about 1995 my ‘day job’
involved me more and more in the
development of free, open source
software for Unix/Linux systems
p
[1,2] .
At home, my old Risc PC started to
gather quite a bit of dust after I
acquired a Linux box.
pEventually,
in 2003, the time had
come for another upheaval. I dusted
off the source code, ported it to Linux,
and released it under the new name of
Philip’s Music Writer as an open source
package, under the GNU General
Public License [3,4] . In this incarnation,
the program has gone back to its roots;
it reads a text input file, writes
PostScript, and is driven from the
command line.
As it is ‘just a C program’ it should be
possible to run it on any system that
has a C compiler and library, and I
believe people have made it run on
Windows and MacOS. Some kind of
GUI wrapper could be written, but so
far I have not felt the need to do this.
There is no need for an integrated
previewer, because PostScript can be
displayed on the screen using
GhostScript, which can also drive
many different kinds of printer and
also convert a PostScript file to a
PDF.
The MIDI output is now in the form
of a MIDI file, which a number of
applications can play.

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Text markup for music
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ben:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ber:
When I started out, the only possible
way of inputting music was as a text
file—there was no possibility of using
a musical keyboard. However, I soon
realized that text input had a number
of advantages. In all but the simplest
music, the notes are in fact only a
small part of what appears on the
page.
A musical keyboard might be able to
input the notes, but not all the other
marks that are required. Furthermore,
a text file can offer standard text
processing advantages such as global
edits, macros, and included files. For
example, it is common to define a
macro to print dynamic marks such as
f in an appropriate font at the required
size. To make a change throughout a
piece of music, all you have to do is
change the macro definition.
The disadvantage of text input is that
the encoding has to be learned, so it is
hard to get started. To reduce the size
of the learning cliff, I tried to invent a
notation that was both compact and
easy to learn. For example, if the note
G is required, the input is just the
letter ‘g’. A lower case ‘g’ gives a
crotchet and an upper case ‘G’ gives a
minim.
For notes longer than a minim, plus
characters are added to upper case
letters, and for notes shorter than a
crotchet, minus and equals characters
are used to specify the number of
‘tails’. The complete set is shown
below.
G++ G+ G g g- g= g=- g==
1
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The notes are only a small part of what appears on the page
Notes can be raised and lowered an
octave by following them with quotes
or backquotes, respectively. Dotted
notes are notated by adding dots.
Sharps, flats, and naturals precede
their notes as they do in printed
music. Choosing a character for sharp
was easy, as there is a # character on
the keyboard. In the absence of any
more obvious characters, I used the
two adjacent characters on the Acorn
keyboard, $ and % for a flat and a
natural. Vertical bar is used to mark
the end of each bar. The length of
each bar is automatically checked,
though it is possible to disable this
checking, and there are features such
as invisible bar lines to indicate where
a line break may occur without
actually printing anything.
This is not the place to go further into
the details of the input. Suffice it to
say that it is possible to control almost
every aspect of how the music is laid
out on the page and that any kind of
conventionally notated music can be
handled.
Conclusion
I started out to write a simple program
that I could use to typeset
arrangements of recorder music for
my children to play. Almost 20 years
have passed, and what is now a much
more comprehensive program that I
ever imagined is still going strong.
Typesetting music presents more
challenges than typesetting text,
because of the two-dimensional nature
of the problem. In a musical score, the
contents of one stave can affect the
Philip’s Music Scribe
layout of those above or below it. Just
like text, it is possible to create music
that is hard to read simply because of
the way it has been printed. Exactly
why this is so in any particular case is
not always easy to tell—this is where
experience is needed. Philip’s Music
Scribe/Writer does its best to produce
beautiful pages, but it is only a tool. In
the end, it is up to the user of the tool
to make the final judgement.
References
6 6 6
[1] http://www.exim.org
[2] http://www.pcre.org
[3] http://www.quercite.com
[4] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt
The latest version of Philip’s Music
Scribe has been updated to run on the
latest 32-bit RISC OS computers in
addition to our older machines. It is
available free and download details
will be given on the Qercus website.
The program comes complete with
specialist fonts, a detailed manual in
pdf form, and a RISC OS ‘get started’
manual—also in pdf form.
Examples of scripts and output are
shown on the following page; these are
taken from the examples included with
the !PMS program.
Should anyone know of other
programs that are no longer sold
and might be of use to today’s
RISC OS users, then Qercus will
be happy to help re-present them
to a new audience as free or
commercial software.
Qercus & 281 Celebrating 25 years of Acorn, BBC, and RISC OS computing 17
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Philip’s Music Scribe
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Typesetting by KeyNote 31 Skelton Crescent, Crosland Moor, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, HD4 5PN
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Philip’s Music Scribe
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Print-outs from the example
scores at 1 /3 size in Draw format
Symphony 1
William Boyce (1711–1779)
18 Celebrating 25 years of Acorn, BBC, and RISC OS computing Qercus & 281
Violin I
Violin II
Viola
Cello
Bass
3
6
Allegro
4 f
4 f
4 f
4
f
Piano
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effervescent
(Before each repeat pause briefly.
When playing through do NOT pause.)
3
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Computer typesetting by Philip Hazel
#4. Herbert Bielawa
Just Add Water
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B
(Go to
beginning)
C
(Go to
beginning)
5
(Go to
beginning)