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Simon Wascher schrieb:
| Why do'nt you use the P:field within the tune body for the "Reprise"
| text?
...
| To my personal understanding I always wonder why someone created a field
| that organizes the playing order and does not allow the usual part and
| playing order terms to be used within.
As far as I can tell, Chris never said that such things aren't
allowed. He merely described the two kinds of P lines, and gave an
example of their use in one kind of music (Morris dance). When I
first read this, my immediate reaction was that P could obviously be
used for such things as P:Intro or P:Trio. There was nothing in
Chris's documentation to discourage this. I was a bit surprised when
I found that some people interpreted Chris's one example as meaning
that nothing else is allowed. These are all valid interpretations of
the English term "part", after all.
| In fact, the P: field mixes up two things in an unfortunate way: P: as
| in part P: as in playing order (of these parts)
Chris's original documentation made it clear that P in the header and
P within the tune had different meanings. He didn't say much more. It
was pretty obvious that P lines in the music should contain only one
symbol that named that part, and the one P line in the header should
contain only the symbols used in the music section. How such things
as repeats were indicated was left unstated (possibly partly because
the Morris dance crowd isn't even very consistent about this).
| $ Example: P:[Einleitung][1.][1.][2.][2.][1.][Ausgang]
Less messy would be to just use either of:
$ Example: P:Einleitung,1,1,2,2,1,Ausgang
$ Example: P:Einleitung 1 1 2 2 1 Ausgang
These are both unambiguous and more readable. And, given the large
amount of ABC that is hand-typed (by people who can't even bother to
include an X line ;-), this is probably what you'll see no matter
what a future standard may say. Remember that ABC is used as a sort
of musical shorthand in person-to-person communication; it isn't just
a computer notation. There are people who read and write ABC directly
and don't use any ABC software.
We might also note that Chris's original descriptions dealt only with
abc2mtex, which is a music formatter. Like abc2ps, it doesn't need to
understand P lines; it only needs to recognize them and copy the text
to the right place on the output page. For such programs, there's
little need to standardize what text can be on a P line. It's just
text, with no actual meaning. However, we also now have ABC players,
and they do need to understand P lines. So we should probably be
concerned with making the syntax as simple and parsable as we can, if
we want it to actually be implemented consistently.
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