Typesetting

Carnatic Music

with

CarMusTy

By

Gopalakrishna Palem

CineFx Digital Media Pvt Ltd2010

CONTENTS

Contents i

1 Introduction 11.1 Download & Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21.2 Copyright . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2 Typsetting Music 42.1 Language Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

3 Laying out the Book 6

4 Configuring the Languages 7

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1INTRODUCTION

CarMusTy is an all in one environment for typesetting Carnatic music Books. It is a one stop solution toedit Carnatic music notation files, generate MIDI files and typeset portable document format books.

The advantages of using CarMusTy for typesetting the Carnatic music, as opposed to using any otherediting application (such as Word or other music typesetting systems) are:

• CarMusTy allows Phonetic Transliteration of notation and lyrics. That is, you can enter Carnaticmusic notation and lyrics once in phonetic english and let CarMuty transliterate the content intomultiple languages, such as Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Hindi etc on the fly.

• CarMusTy is compatible with CFugue Carnatic music programming library, which means that thenotation you enter in CarMusTy is actually capable of producing music!! Yes, CarMusTy can gener-ate MIDI files from your song notation automatically.

• Numerous settings are provided in the application to customize the appearance of song notationand lyrics. CarMusTy generates PDF Books customized to your preferences and the in-built PDFpreview window helps you see the output on the fly.

• Songs in CarMusTy environment support various attributes, such as Raga, Tala, Author, Composeretc., which will be automatically indexed by CarMusTy and inserted in the generated PDF book.

• CarMusTy supports Templates to ease the work of creating new books based on existing docu-ments, and it ships with numerous Default Templates that help new beginners jump start withworking on it with ease.

Note that CarMusTy is a typesetting environment, and not a word processing application. While word pro-cessors, such as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Word etc., help you create and edit documents, typesettingapplications, such as CarMusTy, help you publish Books. The difference is the typography finesse. Fora book to have the professional level of acceptance, its typography must meet the accepted publishingstandards. CarMusTy fully supports the Metric, US and British publishing standards and is built on topof the powerful TEX layout system.

As a CarMusTy user, you have access to all this professional quality publishing power right at yourfingertips, and this manual is a one stop guide to help you master that power. Lets get started . . .

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CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 2

Figure 1.1: Carnatic Music Typesetting Environment

1.1 Download & Setup

CarMusTy is available for download at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/carmusty/. The follow-ing steps eases the process of setting up the CarMusTy environment.

1. Download the CarMusTy Standalone zip file and extract the content to a location on your hard drive(say C:\CarMusTy). Now you have the CarMusTy executable with you at C:\CarMusTy\CarMusTy.exe.With this you can start creating and editing Carnatic music files, but cannot generate PDF books.

2. Generation of PDF requires X ELATEX to be available on your machine. If you already have it installedon your machine, skip the next step. In case you do not have it, or not sure if you have it or not,then follow the next step.

3. To get X ELATEX, you can either download the MikTex Portable distribution from the projects down-load page or directly from the original MikTex distribution at: http://www.miktex.org/portable/about. In both cases, create a new directory named MikTex in your CarMusTy location and extractthe content to that location.

In the end you should have a directory structure similar to <CarMusTy Location> \MikTex\miktex\bin\

where the xelatex executable will be present. For example, C:\CarMusTy\MikTex\miktex\bin\xelatex.exe

4. In case you already have X ELATEX on your machine, or have placed the MikTex Portable distributionunder a different path, then you can configure CarMusTy’s application settings to point to yourcustom location. Use the Edit | Application Settings menu to invoke the settings dialog and set thexelatex executable directory path.

5. If you have setup the MikTex Portable distribution afresh, then run the Windows command scriptfile named miktex-portable found in the <CarMusTy Location> \MikTex\ directory.

6. Now you are ready to use CarMusTy to generated PDF books. Run the CarMusTy executable andclick on the Typset | Build menu item. This should launch the PDF build and if everything is setup

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 3

correctly, you should see the build progress dialog complete successfully and a default PDF docu-ment preview generated in your CarMusTy application window correctly.

7. If your MikTex Portable distribution is missing any required packages, which would be the case ifyou have downloaded the distribution directly from the MikTex website, then the chances are youwould be prompted with errors similar to the one shown in figure 1.2. Usally MikTex automatically

Figure 1.2: MikTex warns you if your installation is missing any packages

tries to install the missing package from its internet repository location. If it is not able to do so,you can manually use the MikTex Package Manager to install the missing package. This option canbe found in the context menu of the MikTex icon placed in the notification area of the taksbar whenyou run the miktex-portable command script.

1.2 Copyright

CarMusTy is a product of CineFx Research Labs, made available free of charge for personal and researchuse. For commercial usage, please contact the author. CarMusTy is distributed with the hope that it willbe useful. No warranty of what-so-ever is implied, including merchatability or fitness for a particularpurpose.

Author: Gopalakrishna Palem Project: http://carmusty.sourceforge.net

Copyright (C) 2010 CineFx Digital Media Pvt Ltd.

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2TYPSETTING MUSIC

CarMusTy is a typesetting environment for publishing Carnatic music books. In the following you willlearn how to master its feature rich capabilities.

The UI of CarMusTy is primarily divided into two regions. The PDF preview region on the top and theCarnatic Music Song Book input entry region at the bottom. The input entry region is a docked windowthat can be resized or relocated for convenience.

Initially the PDF preview pane will be blank when the application is launched. It will be loaded witha preview once you start building the document. Additionally there are other docked panes, such asContents, Fonts and PDF Info, which will also be empty initially and populated later.

The Carnatic Music Song Book input entry region allows you to enter song notation, lyrics and setvarious properties. While all the properties are optional and can be left as blank, the Raga and Tala,nonetheless, are two important properties that you might want to fill for every song you create, apartfrom the song Title, ofcourse. Title is the identifier of the song, usually reflecting the words from the firstline of its lyrics. Note that the Title is what gets displayed in the Table of Contents for that song.

All the other properties, such as Author, Composer, Singers etc., when filled with valid values, will bedisplayed in the song header. In addition they will also be indexed at the end of the book word wise, sothat any one accessing the book finds it easy to access to songs based on the Author, Composer or Singers.

Since the raga and tala are also indexed, your book readers find it easy to access the songs raga-wiseor tala-wise also (apart from the title-wise table of contents) making it an alternate way to navigate andlocate the content they want.

The properties pane of the song-book window (2.1) is the place where you configure these values.CarMusTy natively recognizes all the 72 melakartha janya ragas and 35 talas, allowing you to select theappropriate vlaues for your songs. You can either use the listed raga, tala values or enter your own customvalues.

Note that CarMusTy allows different verses in a song to have different raga and tala values. This isuseful when entering ragamalika.

One of the features of CarMusTy that makes it easier to work with is its ability to use the preconfig-ured properties in the form of Templates and pre-populated values. Templates allow you to configure theproperties to their frequently used values and set them to be used for all default new entries. Useful forlanguage selections. Pre-populated values are the values rememberd by CarMusTy as and when you enterthem, which will be used for auto-completion next time when you try to enter the same value.

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CHAPTER 2. TYPSETTING MUSIC 5

2.1 Language Selection

One of the prime features of CarMusTy is its ability to per-form phonetic tralisteration. CarMusTy allows you to selectdifferent languages for notation, lyrics and content, all ofwhich can be set in the Song & Book Properties pane. Theentries defined are:

Notation: The language that should be used for transliter-ating the song notation

Lyrics: The language that should be used for tranlisteratingthe song lyrics

Content: The language that should be used for transliteringthe Book content such as Titles, Names etc.

By default, the language settings used are:

Book: No Transliteration

Songs: Inherit Book Settings

When No Transliteration is selected, the input will be outputas is. No transliteration is carried out. This is useful if yourinput is plain english and not phonetic english.The Inherit Book Settings option allows songs to inherit theirlanguage value from the Book settings. This means when theBook language is changed, the change will be applied to thesong also. For example, when song notation is set to InheritBook Settings, and Book notation is set to Tamil, then theoutput notation will be in Tamil (since the song inherits theBook language).CarMusTy allows you to specify Inherit Book Settings to onlyfew Songs, and let the other songs use their own languages.In such case, the Book language changes will not be propa-gated to the songs that are not inherting the values.By Default, all verses inherit the song’s language settings.All verses in a song share the same language transliteration.Verses with multiple transliterations in a single song is notsupported. Figure 2.1: Song & Book Properties

The language settings selected for the Book controls the overall language used by default for all thesongs. However, you can configure different language settings for different songs individually. Each songcan use its own language settings that are different from other songs. The Advanced Settings feature allowsyou to configure the default language settings that should be used for creating new songs in the book.

Note that any changes to the existing songs’ notation and lyrics language are applied dynamically onthe fly and you should be able to see the resulting transliterated content in the Carnatic Music Song Bookpane in realtime.

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3LAYING OUT THE BOOK

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4CONFIGURING THE LANGUAGES

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