I have been learning to play the Scottish Highland Bagpipes since about February 1997, under the tutelage of the excellent Davyd Leech, from the Golden City Pipe Band in Bendigo. Since February 1999 I've expanded my horizons with the band, and am also playing the bass drum, with tuition by the exceedingly talented and patient Jason Gerdsen.
I'm a computer person, so it wasn't long until I discovered the wonderful Bagpipe TeX package for typesetting bagpipe music using MusicTeX. However, the paper size defaults for Bagpipe TeX, as distributed, assume US letter paper. For those of us outside North America, this meant that the output didn't look terribly good on the A4 paper that we mostly use. So I hacked a little at Bagpipe TeX and made some design decisions about how it should treat A4.
I also fiddled with the little macro that calculates
\today, to make it generate Australian date format,
which is day-month-year, although US format M-D-Y is
becoming more common here - that's cultural imperialism for you
:-).
If you would find these mods useful, they're
here. This is a Unix "context diff", obtained
by running diff -c over the original file and my
modified version. You are not expected to understand the file (I don't),
but you can use it to patch the original bagpipe.tex
file at the Unix command line, thus:
This will find the filepatch < A4diffs
bagpipe.tex (assuming it's in
the current directory), update it using the
diffs file, and rename the old version to bagpipe.tex.orig.
Couldn't be simpler! Of course, this assumes that you have a
Unix-compatible patch available, and that it works the same
as mine does. If you'd rather not go to all that trouble, you
could instead just download my already-patched version of
Bagpipe TeX.
Watch this space. Coming soon: pictures, soundfiles, etc... who knows what might happen!