>> A somewhat trickier problem is that there's currently a fair amount >> of abc tunes that don't even use the initial repeat on second and >> later sections. Some users seems to think that :| is a fine way to >> start a repeated section. > This is also what many printed sources do, e.g. Kerr's Merry Melodies > (as popular as all other Scottish tunebooks put together and then some) > and the Northumbrian Pipers' Tunebooks (later numbers of which were > typeset with abc2mtex, but I haven't seen those).
and I could have added that O'Neill's 1001 did the same thing (probably influenced by Kerr, the layout is generally similar). Which implies that pretty much everybody who's seen book versions of the material that forms the bulk of the ABC corpus will be used to repeats written the way I do it. I also checked the oldest piece of music paper I've got, a manuscript from 1816 that contains Scottish music and Mozart piano pieces, and the people who compiled that did it the same way, systematically all through. So Kerr didn't invent this. (To be more precise: the convention is that you use a double-sided or left repeat if it occurs in the middle of a line, but never at either end). I've had a look through my collections and the only ones I can find that ever use a begin-repeat sign at the start of a whole tune are Highland pipe music books. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
