On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 03:33:26 -0500 "Jon Murphy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
<snip> > Now let's apply the lessons of thirty years of > internet to > music printing software. <snip> >. What is needed is a > protocol for printing staff or tabulation, and subsets that print Italian or > French tabulation - or full score or normal staff or C staff or whatever. > Finale and the rest should get together and agree on one - at the print end. > Then they can concentrate their bells and whistles into the input and > playback end. No real conversion is required, a simple program to turn each > firm's output into a standard print format would suffice, and that should be > written by a consortium and offered free. Jon: What you have described above has in fact been available for years. PostScript is a page description language that Adobe created probably 20 years ago. It has been used for transferring and transmitting printed output of all kinds of programs (including music printing programs) among and between all kinds of computing equipment from its earliest days. The later modification of it called "Encapsulated PostScript" allows for easier import of the printed output of one program (including all kinds of music) into many other programs. The expansion of PostScript to Portable Document Format (PDF) files has led to much more universal use for the exchange of printed output of all kinds of programs, including music in pitch notation and tablature. (Examples can be found at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~lsa/publications/index.html#retro and at dozens of other places on the Internet.) The standards for creating PDF files are in the public domain, and free utilities are available for converting the output of programs that do not already include that capability. That said, Jon, in spite of what you wrote, what you were probably driving at was not the exchange of printed output but rather the exchange of editable data. In fact PostScript can function in that capacity as well. For more than a dozen years a program called FinalScore has been available to convert the PostScript output of Finale to SCORE data file format. It is not free and not perfect, but it is widely used by professionals in the music engraving business for correcting and editing for publication material submitted as Finale documents. An attempt at a more universal data exchange standard for musical information is something called Notation Interchange Format or NIF files. Unfortunately, although it has been around for probably most of a decade, only a few programs actually support it, and they are relatively rarely used -- does anyone on this list actually edit music with Lime? A newer standard for musical data exchange that looks like it may gain wider acceptance is MusicXML. The organization pushing it is called Recordare LLC. See: http://www.musicxml.org It is still in the "Version 1" stages and does not support tablature well yet, but there is clearly interest in extending it in that direction. One should not forget Wayne's TAB format. That was the earliest widely-accepted format for entering tablature data for computer processing and printing. It is still in use for that purpose, and the format is supported for data import and export in Fronimo and Django. Regards, Daniel Heiman <snip> > > Best, > Jon > > > > To get on or off this list see list information at > http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html > > --
