John Walsh wrote: > One basis of misunderstanding here may be an assumption that >instrument-specific notation must be carved in stone in the language--as >u and v for upbow and downbow are now, for instance. It doesn't. (It >can't, really, for abc doesn't have the resources. In my own case, I have >to invent notation which would be quite useless to almost anyone else, and >I certainly don't want to saddle others with it.) However, I think that a >lot of the instrument specific--and other--notation could be introduced >from the users end, if there just is sufficient flexibility in abc. (And >there is, at least potentially.) For instance, suppose we had a >generalization of the much-overused guitar-chord mechanism which would: > > (a) put arbitrary text over the staff > > (b) ditto under the staff > > (c) ditto over a note > > (d) ditto under a note > > (e) ditto in front and behind a note > >and which could > > (f) deal with fonts, and > > (g) have enough flexibility in positioning to >keep things from overwriting each other, and even (heresy!) make them >look nice.
BarFly does (a) - (e) already. (f) is planned for the version after next. The text editor will already let you set the font, style, size and colour of any range of characters (even individual characters if you want), and this information will be transferred to the music display on request. Of course it won't be possible to transfer this information to other programs, as it's not part of the abc. I'd like (g) to be automatic if at all possible, but it remains to be seen if that can be done. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
