> At the other end of the staff, I've received several messages from > people complaining about some of my files that put a bar line at the > start of the staff. They insist that this is illegal. It isn't, of > course, and is in fact common practice in some musical circles > (mostly those who also write partial measures at the end of a staff). The problem is not just that the barlines are at the start of a line. That would just be a stylistic preference, albeit an irritating one. What you do very often in your files is write two consecutive barlines with no music in between them; one at the end of a line and one at the beginning of the next line. I don't care whether it is legal, it's a timewasting pain in the arse that makes BarFly's (and probably Bryan Creer's) error checking utilities gag - if you say your tune is in 4/4, 0/4 is not a legitimate bar length. I have to edit this out before re-running the error checker to look for more significant problems. Support for error checkers is not mandated by the ABC standard, but making it impossible to use them is not going to do anything to help get ABC accepted or to improve the quality of the ABC corpus. Putting a barline at every point where *you* want the start of a line to be also makes it gratuitously difficult for your users to choose a different layout, either because they want a different note density than you or because they want to switch between portrait and landscape. There are *some* pieces where a specific layout is hard to avoid, but for the ordinary one-voice tunes that make up the bulk of the ABC on the web (and the bulk of what's on your site) there's no earthly need to hardwire this in. (I need to print some tunes for children in the next few months; the notation will have to be much less dense than the norm for ABC printing applications). I have sometimes seen ABC2WIN files where a linefeed occurs between the two strokes of a double bar. How is a buggy-ABC-fixer supposed to tell that isn't what you did? =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
