There are two very nice things about it. First, for those of us who believe that a computer without Windoze is like a chocolate cake without mustard and ketchup, it's platform independent. So long as you obtain the correct version of TEX, you can run it on pretty much any system you may have around the house - including that abandoned XT. As a bonus you also end up with an excellent typesetting system for any sort of document.

The second nice thing about the cost. All of this is absolutely free. All you have to do is download it and install it. A search engine will find you the correct version of TEX for your system; OzTex for the Mac, EmTex for DOS, OS/2 and Windoze, and TeTex for Linux. Then get the MusicTEX and BagpipeTEX macros.

In one word, installation. The instructions were written by the same propellorheads who created the program. Such people are not accustomed to communicating with ordinary mortals. Things that are perfectly obvious to them are not obvious to everyone else. Nevertheless, it can be done.

The first thing to do is get TEX working. Since the procedures for doing that vary from platform to platform, I leave you to your own devices there.

Use whatever file search facility your system provides to locate the *.tfm files within the TEX subdirectories. Then copy the .tfm files from the MusicTEX directory to the TEX subdirectory containing similar files.

Now do the same for each of the other file extensions.

Then open the Bagpipetex zip file into its own temporary subdirectory and repeat the above process.

Now run initex from the command line, using the musictex.ini file. (I'm not sure if this step is necessary, but I did it and everything worked.) Then run it again with the bagpipe,ini file, which creates the correct format for processing bagepipe music.

Everything should now be operational. Test it by entering "tex &bagpipe" (without the quotes) on a command line. You should be left with a prompt consisting of two asterisks. It wants a filename. Enter "quickref" (again, without the quotes). With any luck, there will be a flurry of activity, followed by an announcement that the file quickref.dvi has been created.

Open the file in your DVI viewer ("v quickref" at the command line works in EmTEX.) A dialogue box will probably appear asking whether you want the necessary fonts to be created. This is not a major decision. If you say No, all you're going to get is a nice array of little boxes on the screen.