Re: [abcusers] Announcement: ABC 2.0.0 draft online

[MCPearce0]

First congratulations to Guido on putting this together - it does seem to include most of the updated features. I have stayed out of most of the discussions on what to include/exclude from the standard, but would like to give a group of comments on this draft form (and I have counted to several hundred). Although the list looks long it actually covers essentially only two topics: 1) Additions to the accents  and 2) note heads, only the latter being a real addition to the proposed standard.

Mick


1. In the accents I think it should be made clearer that multiple accents are allowed. !pp!!trill! etc.

2. While the accents list is now fuller than formerly, there are some others I think should be added:

   a) !diamond! to place a small diamond over the note

   b) !circle! to place a small circle over a note
       Both of these are used to indicate harmonics in various contexts

   c) !glissando(!  and !glissando)! (after fashion of crescendo) to draw a glissando line between notes

   d) !tremolo1! !tremolo2! and !tremolo3" to draw a note with 1, 2 or 3 diagonal lines over        them to indicate tremolo

   e) !horizontal(! and matching !horizontal)! (after the fashion of the crescendo) to draw a general horizonal line over a group of notes, usually to be used with some accompanying text (eg position indicator: "^IV"!horizontal(! ... !horizontal)!

   f) Since chords are allowed arpeggiation markers (vertical wavy line, with or without direction arrows) would also be useful !arpeggio! !arpeggioup! !arpeggiodown! for directionless, up and down.

   g) String indicators (usually a number in a circle) !(1)! etc

   h) Right hand finger indicators. For the guitar the letters p,i,m,a,e are used so perhaps !rhp!, !rhi! etc (As a guitarist I prefer to use a notation package to do guitar music,
rather than abc which I use generally only for folk songs/tunes, but as people are setting other types of music these may be useful).

These may seem too many, but as pointed out, programs can just ignore accents they don't recognise/wish to process. On the other hand the Bartok/snap-pizzicato accent is included and is probably less commonly used than some of these others (glissando for instance).


3. The thing I find most desirable to include which is not here is varied note head types , for me most often the cross-head 'x' to indicate unpitched spoken words or noises (taps, bangs) , but diamond note heads are used to show harmonics in guitar music. These could be included as formatting options:

   %%notehead x               or %%notehead cross
   %%notehead /                or %%notehead slash
   %%notehead <>             or %%notehead diamond
   %%notehead []               or %%notehead square
   %%notehead +               or %%notehead plus
   %%nothead standard    % to reset to normal

For my purposes this wouldn't be too bad - spoken sections in songs tend to be only a few bars long. Other mechanisms would be possible.

(4.Oh and the page numbers in the pdf file are currently incorrect!)