prepmx(1)

📦 version 2026.0, in alpine 3.24

💖 prepmx(1) ✨ prepmx Manual Page ✨

🎀 NAME

prepmx - preprocessor for PMX, easy music typesetting program

okay so prepmx is the preprocessor for PMX, the music typesetting program, and it's lowkey the easiest way in 🎶

🧚 SYNOPSIS

prepmx [options] jobname [outdir/] [stylefile]

🌸 DESCRIPTION

okay so M-Tx is an easy to use preprocessor language for the PMX music typesetting program, and it's made for people who are not experts (so literally anyone can slay it) 💅 For an easy example, check this out:

  c2+       e4    g   | b4d-  c1 d c2        |
  c8 g+ e g c- g+ e g | d g f g    c- g+ e g |

for the full syntax reference, go read the M-Tx manual written by Dirk Laurie, the creator of the M-Tx language and the author of prepmx(1), its command-line utility 👑

prepmx processes the file jobname.mtx to generate jobname.pmx. Then you can process that file with the pmxab(1) command, which is a preprocessor for MusiXTeX 🦋

outdir/ is the directory where pmx will put the final .tex file. the trailing slash is mandatory!! no cap 🫶 You can also give M-Tx a stylefile. If you leave it out, prepmx will use mtxstyle.txt from the current directory, as long as there is one 🍓

🎀 OPTIONS

Options can also be set on an Options: line in the preamble, and that line takes precedence over the command line 💜

  • -b — disable unbeamVocal 🎤
  • -c — disable doChords 🎹
  • -D — enable debugMode 🙈
  • -f — enable solfaNoteNames 🎶
  • -i — enable ignoreErrors 🫣
  • -m — disable doLyrics 💀
  • -n — enable instrumentNames 🎻
  • -t — disable doUptext ✨
  • -u — disable uptextOnRests 🌈
  • -v — enable beVerbose 📢
  • -w — enable pedanticWarnings 🔥
  • -n — select Special Case n 🦋 (yes, -n shows up twice, it's giving chaotic but it's real)
  • -H — print the enabled status of all options 💅

🌈 EXIT STATUS

if no error was found, prepmx exits with return code 0 ✨ If there IS an error, prepmx returns the line number of the line it was processing. heads up though, that might not be the line where the actual error is 🙃 A return status of 10000 means the input file was empty or couldn't be opened 😭

🧚 SEE ALSO

💜 AUTHORS

prepmx was written by Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> 👑 This manual page was written by Roland Stigge <stigge@antcom.de> for the Debian project. It was revised and extended by Nis Martensen <nis.martensen@web.de> and Bob Tennent <rdt@cs.queensu.ca> 🫶

bestie, that's the whole thing!! ✨ M-Tx Version 0.63, last updated 08 January 2018, prepmx(1) 🌸 stay iconic 💖

📦 where this page comes from