--------
| > I would like to see in BarFly is a "Save as standard abc" menu
| > command. A text file would be saved (and displayed) that preserves
| > as much of the active file as possible without using any features
| > not found in the current standard. V: lines and whatever else
| > would either be stripped or "commented out" (%). What would remain
| > would be readable by any program that adhered to the standard, and
| > would therefore be suitable for posting publicly.
|
| How would this command know, when dealing with a four-part harmonization
| of a hymn, whether the tune was in the soprano or tenor line?
|
| I would have no use for this. When I violate the standard I know why
| I'm doing it, and the "standard" version wouldn't express what I want.
| I would rather post what I mean and leave it to the user to decide how
| to handle it. It's not like these "violations" are easy - using the
| "w:" feature is a hell of a lot of work and someone who's managed to
| get a text underlay right is not just going to throw it all away again.
|
| The following is nonstandard in only one respect, the variable-length
| gracenotes (I think fermatas are standard now?) They're an essential
| part of the music and if ABC can't represent them, well, as Schoenberg
| said when somebody told him his violin concerto was too difficult to
| play, "I want the little finger to grow longer. I can wait."
That's a great quote. Anyhow, I've added your example to my test
directory. I've been seeing places where I'd really like to use
lengths on grace notes, and I've been thinking of hacking this into
abc2ps. It's hard to do Baroque music without long grace notes. But
it probably won't be working tomorrow. I've looked at the code a bit,
and it seems to me that what is needed is to just eliminate the
current code that handles grace notes, and instead just treat them as
ordinary notes that happen to be drawn smaller. Then of course we'll
want an option to say how much smaller. This all could get a bit
tricky, especially when you consider things like the alignment of
notes in voices, where only the big notes would be aligned.
Meanwhile, now that I have a sourceforge account, there's this little
temptation to grab every version of abc2ps that I can find and look
into merging them into a single source. I suspect that this might not
be all that easy ...
Your ``I know why I'm doing it, and the "standard" version wouldn't
express what I want'' is a nice, clear summary of why so many of us
are looking for extensions that others consider worthless. If you
don't need something, then of course it's useless to you. But if you
need it, the fact that someone else doesn't isn't much consolation.
I now have quite a lot of files with w: lines.
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
