mdgBookSVGKit

Here’s an opportunity for one to “compose” minuets and to author a Collection Book!!!

This folder contains materials that allow the user to author a book containing a collection of Musical Dice Games (MDG) minuets, generated based on the rules given in Musikalisches Würfelspiel, K.516f (Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus).

To creat a book, simply download (or clone this project) to one’s computer, unzip the downloaded archive, and at the command line inside the main folder (mdgBookSVGKit-master directory) issue the following command (pre-requisites: BASH, ABCMIDI, ABCM2PS, Ghostscript, Inkscape, and LaTeX):

bash HOWTO

Wait for a few minutes, i.e., until one gets the bash prompt again. The compiled book in PDF format (mdgBookSVGv1.pdf), among other things, should be located in the res folder (subdirectory).

(In Termux, use bash HOWTO-termux instead).

For the Impatient

To download and examine an example of a book (mdgBookSVGv1_1.pdf) that was generated in a similar manner, simply right-click (then “Save Link As …”) on the following image:

(Note: To enable the MIDI audio links in the book, one should download mdgBookSVG_1-midi.zip and unzip in the same directory in one’s computer that contains the book, i.e., the book and midi files have to be in the same directory).

Important Parameters

To personalize one’s generated book (in addition to the randomly generated minuets), one may want to change some of the default parameters/values in the following (all three files are initially found in the main directory but are eventually moved into the res folder):

• mdgBookSVGv1.tex - (main latex file) see lines 35-45; also, one may have to occassionally change the \topmargin and \textheight values in lines 267 and 268, to ensure that each audio MIDI file will be on the same page as the corresponding musical score
• mdgBookSVGv1-cover.tex- makes the cover of the book; see lines 35-45 of mdgBookSVGv1.tex for default values
• hyperref.cfg - contains the \hypersetup keyvalues; one may wish to change the default value of pdfauthor, among other keyvalues; see the documentation for the TeX package hyperref for more information on these keyvalues.

Once the desired changes have been made to the files above, one can then re-compile the book by issuing, in the res subdirectoy, the last set of commmands in the HOWTO file:

pdflatex -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode -shell-escape mdgBookSVGv1.tex
bibtex mdgBookSVGv1.aux
pdflatex -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode -shell-escape mdgBookSVGv1.tex
pdflatex -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode -shell-escape mdgBookSVGv1.tex

Also, line 32 of the HOWTO is set by default so that each new book created contains 250 minuets. One may wish to change this number, as desired, to some other counting number. This has to be done before issuing the bash HOWTO command within the mdgBookSVGKit-master directory.

Related Sites

• Mozart - A site maintained by Marian Aldenhövel allows the visitor to generate a MDG (user-specified or randomly-generated) and the corresponding audio ( midi, wav) and image files (pdf, png) based on Musikalisches Würferspiel, K. 516f.
• Opus Infinity - Collaborative work of Robbert Harms, Hein Moors, and Suus van Petegem whose goal is to unravel the mystery behind the tables used for generating MDGs. Site visitors can generate MDGs based on works of Kirnberger, Mozart, Stadler/Haydn, and Bach. Corresponding audio files (mid, ogg, and/or mp3) and image files (pdf or png) are also made available for listening, viewing, or downloading.
• Mozart - A site maintained by John Chuang that allows the site visitor to generate MDGs based on the work of Stadler/Haydn.
• mozart.zip - This is a Windows software (© 1995 VisionSoft) by John Chuang and Stephen Goodwin that generates MDG based on input from user and is available for free from Amaranth Publishing.
• Mozart - Musical Game in C K. 516f* (http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~rb5h-ngc/e/k516f.htm), Mozart Studies Online - The site of Hideo Noguchi that offers an explanation linking Musikalisches Würferspiel, K. 516f and K. 294d (K. Anh. C 30.01).

Acknowledgements

My sincerest gratitude to Chris Walshaw et al. for the ABC music notation; Jean-Francois Moine for abcm2ps and the accompanying examples, templates, and pointers for the appropriate use of these resources; Guido Gonzato for the ABC Plus Project and the abcmidi resources available there, more especially for the ABC resource book Making Music with ABC 2; James R. Allwright and Seymour Shlien for abcmidi source and binaries; Artifex, Inc. for Ghostscript v.9.06 (includes the ps2pdf converter); Inkscape v.0.48.5 for the tool for converting SVGs to PDFs for inclusion into LaTeX documents; and, User:Martin H for his reply to a TeX/LaTeX Stack Exchange question on including SVGs into LaTeX documents. Special thanks also to the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) for making available the score for Musikalisches Würfelspiel, K.516f and Amaranth Publishing for a copy of mozart.zip. Ditto to Machtelt Garrels for the book Bash Guide for Beginners, Vivek Gite for the book Linux Script Shell Tutorial, Steve Parker for the Unix/Linux Shell Cheatsheet. John Fogarty’s GitHub Site: Latex CreateSpace BookCover and Peter Wilson’s reply in TeX/LaTeX Stack Exchange on designing a book cover were sources of ideas, information, and materials for creating the book cover and title page, thanks to both of them. Many thanks to the Debian Project for the Debian 8 (Jessie) GNU/Linux OS, TeXLive for the TeX distribution, to Brian Fox for Bash, and GitHub for its generosity in providing space for this project.

License

To the extent possible under law, Justine Leon A. Uro has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to mdgBookSVGKit. This work is published from: Philippines.