> I was under the understanding that since Jim Vint introduced
> the ! token in Abc2Win and that it was only valid as a final
> character (excluding whitespace characters) before EOL.
No, you can find it anywhere in ABC2WIN-created files.
> I had assumed that it had been grudgingly adopted as such in the
> standard. Grudgingly because it started appearing everywhere in
> abc files, because people liked it,
No. I've been arguing for it for a VERY long time, though I've never
used ABC2WIN and, given the sort of coding it seems to encourage,
never intend to (nor, I think, have I ever used an ABC2WIN-created file
without heavy manual editing to make it human-readable). This is the
sort of use I make of it:
X:0074
T:Duncan's Dance.
M:6/8
L:1/8
Q:3/8=120
I: || ||
%% D E ^F G A B c d e ^f g a
K:G
Bcd g3 | Bcd g3 | Bcd efg|aAA A2z|
Bcd g3 |!Bcd g3 | dcB ABc|BGG G3||
BAB GEE| GEE E3 |!BAB GEE|FDD D3 |
BAB GEE| FAG FED| g3 dAc|BGG G3|]
The point is that the tune needs three staff lines to display well on
my setup, there are always going to be situations where it requires
human intervention to get the linebreaks in the right places, and
despite what you say here...
> ABC notation is not supposed to be a print description with formatting
> inline, but simply an absolutely parsimonious description of the music
> with any print/render directives to be included in comments, and not
> disrupting the readability abc by being inline.
that has NEVER described the way ABC handles staff breaks. The 1.6
standard has an explicit, non-comment construct for them: <newline>
generates a staffbreak unless preceded by a \ escape. The problem
that creates is a conflict with readable source. The way I tried
to resolve the conflict before BarFly started to support ! was to
write this:
Bcd g3 |Bcd g3 |Bcd efg|aAA A2z|\
Bcd g3 |
Bcd g3 |dcB ABc|BGG G3||\
BAB GEE|GEE E3 |
BAB GEE|FDD D3 |\
BAB GEE|FAG FED|g3 dAc|BGG G3|]
which is not too bad on a tiny example like this, but with a big
complicated 18th century slow air (the sort of tune where explicit
control of stafflinebreaks is most necessary and where alignment
of parallel phrases makes an enormous difference to accuracy of
transcription) it gets to look like an appalling mess.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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".
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