Nota

Nota is an open source LaTeX package to include properly formatted musical notation in a document. It takes in account the layout of the document and the margins to render the music notation in a way that fits the document and most importantly it can render system by system so the score appears in an "inline" fashion, and wraps naturally like what is expected from text. It's goal is to have a simple interface and good defaults to feel like its "just working".

Another goal of this project is to provide an easy way to edit scores in the software of your liking, and with a simple save and recompile you can have the edited score rerendered in your document correctly, with no need to manually export as image or pdf, edit the image and re-import it in the LaTeX document.

The code can be found in the Github Repository below:

Examples

Below are some examples of the demo documents to demonstrate the macros and capabilities of the package. The blindtext package is used to fill the doc with text for demoing purposes.

A4 Article Demo

A4 paper, with all margins set to 20mm, using the article document class.

A3 Two-Sided Demo

A3 book with the twoside option, featuring distinct inner and outer margins and larger music notation rendering.

How it works

The package uses the Verovio library to render scores and automatically passes the appropriate options to embed them properly formatted in your LaTeX doc with auto generated LaTeX code.

All Technologies Used

LaTeX [website] [github]

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. LaTeX is available as free software.

Required LaTeX Packages: graphicx [ctan], pdfpages [ctan], kvoptions [ctan]

Verovio [website] [github]

Verovio is a fast, portable and lightweight library for engraving Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) digital scores into SVG images. Verovio also contains on-the-fly converters to render Plaine & Easie Code, Humdrum, Musedata, MusicXML, EsAC, and ABC digital scores.

The Music Encoding Initiative - MEI [website] [github]

The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is an open-source effort to define a system for encoding musical documents in a machine-readable structure. MEI brings together specialists from various music research communities, including technologists, librarians, historians, and theorists in a common effort to define best practices for representing a broad range of musical documents and structures.

SMuFL [website] [github]

SMuFL is a specification that provides a standard way of mapping the thousands of musical symbols required by conventional music notation into the Private Use Area in Unicode’s Basic Multilingual Plane for a single (format-independent) font.

MuseScore [website] [github]

MuseScore is an open source and free music notation software. Used through the mscore cli interface.