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I am trying to include a very short piece of musical score (five line stave, 10 notes) into a document of mine. Unfortunately I only have a low-res image (see attached), which is not suitable for printing.

What's the best/quickest way to recreate that score in my article, short of having to learn and deal with MusicTeX, Lilypond or whatever else there might be out there? I am looking for a flat learning curve above all.

enter image description here

Ingmar
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  • ... you sure you don't want to learn MusicTeX? Then the question doesn't really have much to do with this site, does it? — anyway, pick Encore or some GUI app to draw these things, screenshot at high resolution, then include as image should be reasonably good. – user202729 Jan 20 '22 at 10:26
  • Yes, I'm positive that I don't want to learn MusicTeX at this point. That said, I am not a huge fan of „some GUI apps“. Luckily I have since found abc and are confident to be able to make it work. – Ingmar Jan 20 '22 at 11:38
  • Actually duplicate of Can I create music sheets with LaTeX? - TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange then, although there's no abc answer there. (I left a comment there too) you may want to post one there for completion if you know how to use it. – user202729 Jan 20 '22 at 11:52
  • I am very much for looking up old answers … That said, > 11 years is a bit dated, even by TeX standards. I’ll post an answer, though, if I manage to come up with a good one. – Ingmar Jan 20 '22 at 13:42
  • Old answers are up-to-date or not depends on whether readers point out the errors when it becomes outdated or not... – user202729 Jan 20 '22 at 14:00

2 Answers2

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Here is an example of how the code to the above excerpt might look in MusicTeX. You can include the produced pdf or directly use the code between \begin{} ... \end{document} in your file.

\documentclass[11pt]{standalone} 
\usepackage{musixtex}
\def\freqbarno{9999}

\begin{document}
\begin{music}
  \generalmeter{\meterfrac68}
  \startextract
  \NOTes \qlp{jl}\en\bar
  \Notes \qa{n} \cl{l}\en \Notes \qa{j} \cl{l}\en\bar
  \NOtes \qup{g} \qu{g} \cu{g}\en\bar
  \NOTEs \hlp{j}\en
  \setrightrepeat
 \endextract
\end{music}
\end{document}

enter image description here

Nico
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  • Thank you for your answer. I am afraid this does look more (powerful and thus) complex than the situation warrants right now. As I'll elaborate in my own answer below, I have found a solution with abc that fits my simple needs. – Ingmar Jan 21 '22 at 06:50
  • Comparing the output of all (at the time of this writing) three examples, your example looks best. Elegant spacing and well proportioned line thicknesses, I guess. – Jan Jan 21 '22 at 07:44
2

I am posting this as an answer, since comments don’t allow for sufficient flexibility in formatting (and I have since found a good answer to my question).

The ABC package allows for music notation in the ABC format to be incorporated in your LaTeX files. Both the approach (adding another environment to you source file) and the notation are simple – the latter very much intentionally so: a bit like Markdown for Music, if you will :-)

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{abc}

\begin{document}
\begin{abc}
X:1
T:% Title left emptry
M:6/8
K:C treble
L: 1/8
| c3 e3 | g2 e1 c2 e1 | G3 G2 G | c6 z2 |]
\end{abc}
\end{document}

Notation should be pretty obvious when you compare to the final result:

enter image description here

Ingmar
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    Just one remark from a musician: please remove the bar before the first note, and your last measure is too full (you have inserted a rest instead of the repeat). – C. Peters Mar 31 '22 at 11:47