Re: [abcusers] Blank music sheets
Steve Mansfield writes: | Can we agree to move all the OS-upmanship to a separate mailing list that | we can choose whether or not to subscribe to? Probably not. ;-) I'm not sure I'd want such segregation. Something that I've noticed over the years is that I've learned a lot from the "My favorite _ is better than yours" discussions. True, such unsupported claims are not worth much. But it's fairly common for people to challenge such claims, and the attempts to support them very often impart useful information. One of my favorite examples is the "editor wars" that have plagued a lot of mailing lists and newsgroups over the years. I've been mostly a vi user, but I'd have to say that the documentation for it is crummy. This is similar to other editors, of course, especially the supposedly user-friendly ones of recent years. The way I've learned to use a lot of the more powerful features is by watching when someone says "My favorite editor can do _ and vi can't." Some vi partisan would then respond with an explanation of how to do it, and I'd now know how to do it. This has slowly made me a vi "power user". The suppression of this sort of discussion is a serious loss to those of us who are trying to learn something more than the most basic uses of our tools. I've long been a unix user/hacker, but with the huge number of Windoze machines about, there's an obvious value to me in learning to use them, primitive and limiting though they may be. There are lots of things that are "trivial" on unix systems that I don't have a clue how to do on Windoze. The problem is the usual: Either it's not documented, or I haven't yet stumbled across the documentation. Or it really can't be done. In many cases, some of the same things can be done. But it seems that the usual phenomenon is rife: If you ask how to do it, you get useless answers, mixed with insults. So what you do is claim that "my OS can do it but Windoze can't." This is a challenge, and so very often some more experienced user will proceed to show how ignorant you are by explaining how to do it. And you've tricked them into teaching you something. You just need a sufficiently thick skin to casually ignore the insults that come with the lesson. Long-time users of the Net will recognize this as a well-established approach, routinely used by most of the more experienced users of all sorts of computer systems. There's no shortage of arrogance among the unix crowd, of course, which is as annoying to unix users as it is to all others. But you can't stop this attitude; all you can do is hide or suppress it, and then you can't learn anything. Because it often turns out that the most arrogant are also the most knowledgeable. If the Microsoft users go off in a huff and create their own forum, we will all lose. The main value of abc is as a universal music notation that works everywhere. Feedback from users of different kinds of abc software has been valuable in the past, and will be valuable in the future. Comparing interactions with the OS is especially valuable, even if done in a not-so-friendly tone. In the longer run, if we want the OS problems fixed, it will only happen if there are public discussions. Otherwise, the vendors will just use their usual "We don't have any complaints" arguments against users who want improvements. Something I see from being the one who instigated the abc Tune Finder is that most of the abc web sites out there are running a unix-like OS. No surprise here. There are a few Microsoft and Macintosh sites, accounting for maybe 5% of the online tunes. The network security folks have been telling us for years that the biggest security problem on the net is with "monocultures", which can be easily attacked once a single hole is found. It would be better for everyone if we had a wider variety of machines serving up files. The slow growth of linux and apache as the "standard" web server may be gratifying to linux partisans, but it is a huge security risk. So I'd like to find ways of persuading users of non-unix (and non-linux) OSs to put their tunes on their own server. Doing so would inevitably lead to more "OS wars", but I'd consider this a benefit. And if abc users do this, they will also end up putting pressure on their vendors to fix some of the problems that prevent Windoze and the Mac from being used more as web servers. In any case, if there's a Windoze feechur that really is better than how I'd do it on a unix-like system, I'd prefer to hear about it, even if it's told in an insulting fashion. And maybe I'd go off and do my own time-and-motion study, to see if it really is better. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Blank music sheets
John Chambers wrote: Steve Mansfield writes: | Can we agree to move all the OS-upmanship to a separate mailing list that | we can choose whether or not to subscribe to? Probably not. ;-) I'm not sure I'd want such segregation. Something that I've noticed over the years is that I've learned a lot from the "My favorite _ is better than yours" discussions. True, such unsupported claims are snip Well, why not change the heading to something that reflects the content? perhaps, Blank sheets in ABC interactions with In the meantime, if the title is "Blank Music Sheets" I am going to continue to delete the message. I have been able to make my own staff sheets for years with a few seconds of typing in Excell or Word. john b "Do not practice Moderation in excess" To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Blank music sheets
Just for the sake of completeness: There is a Windows program that is supposed to be able to print blank music paper at: http://perso.easynet.fr/~philimar/graphpapeng.htm The output I've seen looks really tacky, but I thought I'd mention it. Frank Nordberg To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Blank music sheets
Frank Nordberg writes: | The sheets at Musica Viva was made with Finale, but, really, any decent | graphics programs should be able to do this work. Just make sure the | lines in each staff is equally spaced (about 2 mm should be fine) and | that there are enough space between the staffs. True, true. Actually, one of my motives for wanting abc2ps to do it is that I sometimes like to produce pages with a tune at the top, perhaps in two or more keys, with the bottom of the page filled out with empty staves. This is really handy for "working" copies of tunes, such as when a group is working on arrangements or medleys or such. The main problem that I've seen so far is getting the staves without things like clefs, bar lines, time signatures, and so on. I've also produced printouts occasionally that have the tune on alternate staves, with a blank staff after every line, so that I (or others) can easily write in a second line, hits about ornaments, and so on. There are a lot of uses for blank staves mixed with printed music. This is one of the things that I like to use when testing various fancy music packages. I find that most don't seem to want to do it. It doesn't seem to have occurred to the designers that musicians might want to do anything other than just read the music. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Blank music sheets
Following a few other emails, John Chambers wrote: Yup; this was more or less what I was thinking when I hacked jaabc2ps to do blank staves in response to M:none K:C clef=none I did look at the postscript example, but with my meagre understanding of PS so far, I couldn't quite discern why it produced the number and size staves that it did. So I couldn't figure out how to tweak it to get the size and spacing that I wanted. On the other hand, I've used abc2ps a bit, and I'm familiar with its %% directives, including the ones that control things like spacing and scaling. So I could fairly quickly and easily write some abc "tunes" to get manuscript paper. You might check out some of my samples: There is a certain amount of silliness to all this, of course, since it's easy enough to make music manuscript paper with a ruler and pen, and this might be faster than trying to get a computer to do it. But that wouldn't be going with the times, y'know. Who would spend 5 minutes doing a job by hand, when they could spend half an hour or more wrestling with a computer to do the same job? Sorry, John, I think you're missing the point. The real question actually is: would you spend a cople of minutes to download a programme that will enable you to obtain any blank music paper sheet you weant/need (that, by the way, can be saved for future use) for the rest of your life in a handful of seconds, or rather spend five minutes any time you need a customised blank music paper sheet? I know, for other OS addicts (which - read Unix/Linux - as far as music/audio support are stone age), this might sound as blasphemy, but I guess some some of the newcomers to the abcusers mailing list which are still using Windows (aka Windoze), might profit from Guido and Tab2paper (and a number of freeware other Windows/Windoze programs). In fact, I fear abc newcomers which are Windows/Windoze users and happen to subscribe to the list generally speaking are prompted to unsubscribe fairly quickly, but this is a problem others should be upsetted by... Back to the point, Frank Nordberg in turn wrote: The sheets at Musica Viva was made with Finale, but, really, any decent graphics programs should be able to do this work. Just make sure the lines in each staff is equally spaced (about 2 mm should be fine) and that there are enough space between the staffs. Nice enough, Frank. I tried the sheets at Musica Viva, butagain, given we might wish to print 'customised' blank music paper, would you consider uploading Guido and Tab2paper, and allow anybody a chance to download them? They are freeware, so I think this would fit with the Musica Viva philopsophy. What more? I wish a VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR to all the abc users. Gianni P.S. And I mean THE REAL abc users - i.e. those which "make a mess of the notation" on other mailing lists, and yet are able to use it "against all odds" as an exchange medium to swap tunes on the web! To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Blank music sheets
Gianni writes: | | P.S. And I mean THE REAL abc users - i.e. those which "make a mess of the | notation" on other mailing lists, and yet are able to use it "against all | odds" as | an exchange medium to swap tunes on the web! Well, REAL abc users don't need any of those fancy-shmancy formatters or players or GUI tools. They just read the abc directly, and write it using a dumb editors. Unix users just use cat. And they write perl or python scripts to munge the abc in useful ways. ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] Blank music sheets
I wrote: Maybe, Windows users might appreciate Guido, a freeware written by Daniel Herlitz a few years ago that makes the task very easy. It offers different paper formats. Christophe Declercq replied: Maybe a few lines of PostScript code is enough. Philip Rowe posted it to the abcusers list on 14/05/99 and since that date I haven't bought a lot of blank music sheets. Regards. Christophe --begin PS code (save it as e.g. blanksheet.ps) %! Adobe Postscript 1.0 /stave. (you can look at the email Christophe posted for the rest) Pretty nice, if using an A4 output you are satisified with a 10 staves sheet with: top margin 3 cm, bottom margin 3.5 cm, left margin 1.5 cm. right margin 2 cm! Yes, of course it means as well: top margin 3.5 cm, bottom margin 3 cm, left margin 2 cm, right margin 1.5 cm. Depends on the point of view! Seriously, I talked about CU-STO-MI-ZING! What about 10 staves with top margin=bottom margin= 3 cm. and left margin=right margin= 1.5 cm? Or an 11rather than a 9 stave sheet? Or about grouping the lines by twos, threes, fours...not to tell about the lines thickness... How many other PostScript lines? No. seriously: "some PostScript lines" aren't enough! Not if you really wish to CU-STO-MI-ZE the output, at least! Regards Gianni P.S. I am not going to learn how to write PostScript files, but if anybody cares I will be glad to post any blank music sheet PS file on request...custom made with Guido, of course! To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
