James Allwrite wrights: | Reading this post gave me a sense of deja vu. ... | In practical terms, I think we are talking about having different fonts | for different things in a printing program. I also think we have to assume | that a player can use context i.e. infer a meaning from a word, which | is presumably how they did things in the old days of handwritten | manuscripts. | | yaps supports ! ! for "musical instructions" which seems to be the closest | thing to a text tempo field and, yes, you can give it its own font.
For a long time, abc2ps has supported both metronome and textual tempo indicators in the Q header fields. Thus, one of the test tunes included with the source (Sentimental Journey) has the line: Q: "Easy Swing" 1/4=140 The quoted text is displayed as-is, while the 1/4 is converted to a note in the usual fashion. The program doesn't care about the order of the contents. There is a tempofont that can be used to make such text visually distinct. Now that inline headers are becoming semi-standard, the obvious way to do an inline change of tempo would be with something like: ... [Q:"accelerando"] ... [Q:1/4=116] ... I did a quick test, and while abc2ps doesn't complain about these, it also doesn't display them. Another check with debug output shows that these inline Q fields are in fact parsed; the problem is that the output code doesn't see the results. I also tried it with the Q fields on their own lines, with \ to produce joining. In this case, the Q contents were all displayed properly, but there were staff breaks at the Q fields despite the use of \ to produce a single staff. So both methods are accepted by abc2ps, but both have bugs. In any case, abc2ps doesn't play the tunes, so it doesn't have any need to understand such quoted text. All it needs to do is display everything properly. Maybe I'll do a bit more debugging, and try to find a few cases in my own music to take advantage of all this. I do have a few tunes where such tempo changes could be useful. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
