>>> (ABC, GIF, and QuickTime formats)
>> Wouldn't pdf be a nice format? IMO better than gif.
>> You could offer both.
> Given he's also providing the ABC, you can produce any format you like.
PDF is primarily a printing format. The user interface of Acrobat Reader
is appallingly clunky compared with even the most primitive web browser
and nobody would use it from choice for the sort of high-speed, window-
juggling, looking at three-or-four-things-at-once sort of interaction I'm
trying to facilitate. My paradigm of a user interface that's the absolute
pits is the touchscreen presentations you get in museums, usually done by
graphic designers using some Macromedia animation package or other: every
interaction is slowed down by timing loops and CPU-hogging dissolves, with
randomly shuffled control placements so you have to relearn what to press
with every new screen (don't those idiots *know* that they're designing
for a generation whose first experience of computer interaction is likely
to be a Playstation?). Acrobat is dismally close to that model, with page
flips being appallingly slow and driven by weirdly located widgets. I've
got vastly more information on the CD than any museum would ever expose to
the public[1], and I'm also trying to create an experience of torrential
immersion rather than quiet art-gallery contemplation, so I *have* to
make navigation as fast as possible, a kind of social-history/musicology
shoot-'em-up.
What I'm providing is music used in a very different way to Atte's stuff.
His is mostly hard to read, hard to play, and needs the best possible
printed score because of the amount of time you'll spend reading it in
rehearsals. At the other extreme, I include four-note and seven-note
street cries I transcribed myself: how many readings of a score do you
need to sing them right? I have a few piano scores (none as complicated
as the hairiest of Atte's), and some long variation-form pieces, but most
of the tunes are half a page long, and given the help they'll get from
the sound files, few readers will need to print many of them, and I'm
guessing that such readers as want better print than my GIFs will also
be picky enough that they'd rather do it themselves from the ABC their
own way than use any PostScript or PDF I might create.
Street cries are an interesting test of ABC software. Most of them are
one bar long and have neither metre nor tonality. Out of all the types
of music on the CD, they're the one where the GIF score bears least
resemblance to what BarFly will generate from the ABC I've provided.
[1] there is an exception. Anyone who's seen the Pitt-Rivers museum in
Oxford will see some similarity of spirit...
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