Typesetting music – Tony Finch

I’ve spent a fun evening getting to grips with Philip’s Music Writer, the music typesetting software written by my esteemed colleague Philip Hazel. This is for the hymn music on the service sheet for our wedding. So far I have done hymn 2 and hymn 3. The result is quite nice, but the source files remind me strongly of the 1970s Bell Labs Unix typesetting utilities, especially because of the amount of fiddling you have to do to work around quirks in the source language.