From: I. Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 00:32:27 +0200 (W. Europe Daylight Time)
[...]
All the standard says is : Generally one line of abc
notation will produce one line of music, although if the
music is too long it will overflow onto the next line.
But I take it that the sentence above means that it WILL
break at a line end and MAY break elsewhere...
Maybe you're correct on that.
Generally does not translate to WILL in my book. In standards-
speak it sounds like a suggestion - maybe even a strong suggestion -
but not a mandate. In pure English it sounds like a description of
what most programs at the time of writing were doing, and I find that
a weak argument for implementing this interpretation as a standard.
The problem as a developer is that we're second-guessing
writers of bad abc notation.
Anyway, I think it's a better approach to let the software do
the formatting of the music lines unless the user forces a
line break, with for example the ! notation found in the
BNF standard. In general, software should not assume that an
ABC file was meant to be print so it would bad to give to
much weight to the exact position of newlines in the file.
I wholeheartedly agree, for several reasons:
1. Text file formatting is notoriously succeptible to modification.
Text editors and word processors can help you by providing a word-
wrap feature unexpectedly; moving text files between DOS, VMS, Unix
and Mac systems can cause interesting interpretations of the newline
characters; web page authors may cut-n-paste without prepending a
forced line break (BR or lt;BRgt;), and the list goes on for quite
awhile. Someone here called it the line break daemon -- excellent
coinage. I think I'll use that to summarize this family of problems
in the future.
2. Writers of ABC text may have different motivations for line breaks
than the formatting of the music score. I break my ABC into the lines
of the quattrains of the verses of the song, since in traditional folk
music there's often much repetition-except-for-two-measures going on.
Formatting the text file to follow the quattrains allows me to use
basic cut-n-paste techniques to great time-saving advantage.
But when the music prints, I don't want to waste the right half of the
page; print it like normal music, eh?
3. Imagine the frustration of trying to manually format ABC such that
your line breaks line up with where the end of the musically printable
page is located. Oops, missed by three notes. Okay, let's re-edit
the whole file so *THIS* line breaks properly and print again. Darn,
now I appear to be a measure short on the second line. Re-edit again
and print. Shucks, now it wraps mid-bar. Darn it! Re-edit again.
Print. Examine. Re-edit. Print. Examine. Re-edit...
May as well draw it with a felt tip pen on school paper.
My first commanding officer had a huge banner on the wall behind his
desk: Using a computer should be easier than not using a computer.
A motto to live by.
I would urge the standards-developers to STRONGLY consider letting ABC
be a mostly-freeform, mostly-whitespace-ignorant langauge. Using a
special character (such as the aforementioned ! character) to indicate
a forced line break on the music is far preferable (and infinitely
more flexible) than assuming line-break in the ABC source file must be
an actual break in printing.
Two cents, and all that rot.
___
Steven K. Mariner
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://home.earthlink.net/~marinersk/
http://www.whirlyjigmusic.com/
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