>> What I'm getting at is that I don't think an abc typesetting program >> should be making "corrections" like this. There is a fairly direct >> correspondance between the notational symbols in the abc file and what >> shows up on the rendered page. If a user *wants* a double bar they can >> write it in the abc file, and if they want something else they can >> specify that, and the typesetter should typeset it as specified. > > This seems to make sense. Well, to me, anyway ... couldn't these symbols > just be treated literally. ie print dots where you see a ":", a normal > barline where you see "|" and a thick bar line where you see "]", in any > combination ? Would this cause any issues. maybe for player programs, if > people started writing free-form combinations of these ?
In many situations you want to be able to error-check your ABC. If you allow any old combination of barlines it can be impossible for an error- checker to tell whether you've created an empty bar by mistake or are intentionally doing Barnett Newman artwork in miniature. So it would make sense for this to be somewhat flexible; have some switch in the error checker to tell it whether to check for this or not. For the original behaviour that started this, it would surely be better for abcm2ps to have insertion of these not-written-in-the-source double bars as a run-time option. Barlines at the start of staff lines are in the same category; they're a display style matter, not something that has any business being in the ABC. (BTW, is there any way to get the barline before the clef OUT of the current BarFly's staff notation, without correcting every PICT it makes with a graphics editor? - having typeset hundreds of tunes with older versions of the program using the no-initial-barline convention, I now find that I can't replace older score files without a glaring mismatch in house style, and I don't find the new way an improvement). After working with all the different conventions James Aird used for repeats and double bars in his tunebooks of the late 18th century - sometimes borrowed from his sources, sometimes changed from one edition to the next as his tastes altered, sometimes changed by the engraver, with hardly a page where the conventions are the same throughout - I'm coming to see double bars less as a code for human communication than as a sort of rapidly mutating parasitic organism that lives at the end of tune sections in books. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro". ------> off-list mail to "j-c" rather than "abc" at this site, please <------ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
