The Werner Icking Music Archive is justly named in honour of the man who devoted years of time and effort to hosting, maintaining, and enlarging this Internet repository of quality sheet music. However, none of us who have contributed to the Archive or who read the TeX-Music list (or its predecessor, MuTeX) can fail to be aware that, without Daniel Taupin, the Archive might never have existed at all and would certainly not exist in its present form; for Daniel was the creator of the music typesetting system with which much of the Archive's contents was produced.
Daniel Taupin held a Doctorate in Physics and worked at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides de l'Université de Paris-Sud at Orsay. He was the author of "Probabilities data reduction and error analysis in the physical sciences" (Editions de physiques 1988).
In the world of TeX, Daniel Taupin's contributions included work on ltx2rtf and the conversion of TrueType fonts to Metafont. His major legacy in this field, however, is his monumental music typesetting system, MusiXTeX. It is a tribute to his achievement that even Donald Knuth acknowledged its quality with a link on his own Web site leading to the MusiXTeX information on the Icking Archive site.
Daniel Taupin loved the mountains since his childhood and was a member of numerous mountaineering and rock climbing organisations, in some of which he served as chairman or secretary. He took part in many climbing expeditions in the Caucasus, the Pamir, Bolivia, Aconcagua, and elsewhere, and was planning an expedition to Nepal for October 2003 when a climbing accident in the Pyrenees prematurely claimed his life.
From the perspective of the community of people using his typesetting tools, Daniel Taupin was not among the more visible or vocal presences in the MusixTeX discussion groups. Those few who met him in person remember him as a colourful personality who held firm opinions, which might on occasion be disturbing but were always justified. Most of us, however, knew little more of him than his announcements of MusiXTeX updates and his occasional responses to technical questions. However, even though he may have remained a somewhat shadowy figure to many, the shadow was nonetheless that of the giant in whose footsteps -- in our various ways and with our various skills -- we all delighted to follow.
He will be always missed and never forgotten. All honour to his memory.
