Richard Robinson wrote: >By "section header", do you mean the global header lines, external to any >tune ? I've been wondering about this recently, whether many people use >them. I like them, I find they can save a lot of fiddly typing, but I'm >not sure what programs handle them. > > (Surely it's not _that_ hard for a GUI app. ? Reading & applying them is > fairly simple, just go through the file & suck the tunes into memory, > with default headers applied where necessary. Writing is an extra fiddle, > if you want to remember the globals, but you don't actually change the > meaning of anything by not doing that. )
>From the abc 1.6 definition: " Information fields ================== The information fields are used to notate things such as composer, meter, etc. in fact anything that isn't music. Most of the information fields are for use within a tune header but in addition some may be used in the tune body, or elsewhere in the tune file. Those which are allowed elsewhere can be used to set up a default for the whole or part of a file. For example, in exactly the same way that tunebooks are organised, a file might start with M:6/8 and R:Jigs, followed by some jigs, followed by M:4/4 and R:Reels, followed by some reels. Tunes within each section then inherit the M: and R: fields automatically, although they can be overridden inside a tune header." So within a file you can have global header lines (at the beginning of the file before any tunes) and section header lines (in between tunes at the start of each section). BarFly supports the global stuff, which can include information fields, macro and symbol definitions, but not section headers between tunes. In order to support these the parser would have to parse the whole file from the beginning in order to display the 900th tune. Remember that the file may have been edited since the last operation without the edits being saved, so it's not sufficient to just parse the whole thing when it's opened. As far as possible I prefer abc tunes to be self-contained. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
