Re: [abcusers] New draft special characters
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Bernard Hill [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes After a week away I'm reading the draft 2.0.0. Doubtless I will have other comments which I will make but simply the special characters: (a) I presume the list is not exhaustive. ie É (Capital E acute) and the like (b) I think we need a copyright symbol. \C or \OC. Maybe also R-in-a- circle although I don't know what it means. (c) Why is £ \243? While I can of course implement it, it makes no sense. Ascii £ is 156. \L would be better. The same comment goes to the other symbols, \ is ascii 92, but how about \/ (d) Other symbols for discussion: crossed C for the cent sign? The accented Y and y? Paragraph marker §? (e) is cedilla C really to be \ c space c? Why not \c? And to add to my own post... what about circle-above-A and its lower case equivalent. Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] New draft special characters
On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Bernard Hill wrote: (a) I presume the list is not exhaustive. ie É (Capital E acute) and the The table only gives a number of examples for each class of supported accents. (b) I think we need a copyright symbol. \C or \OC. The second revision of the 2.0 draft (soon to be released) will solve this issue. Briefly, there will be defined a field called %%abc-copyright, in which any occurrence of the string (C) is to be replaced by the copyright symbol: %%abc-copyright (C) Copyright John Smith 2003 Maybe also R-in-a- circle although I don't know what it means. It means that you registered a trademark with the government trademarks bureau. (c) Why is £ \243? While I can of course implement it, it makes no sense. Ascii £ is 156. Watch out: 156 is decimal, while the number behind the backslash should be the octal code of the character, which is 234 (and _not_ 243, which was a typo!) (d) Other symbols for discussion: crossed C for the cent sign? The accented Y and y? Paragraph marker §? The second revision will allow you to code the free text that appears inside the ABC file, in any of the standard character sets, among which iso-8859-1 (Latin-1) and UTF-8. To this end, there will be introduced an %%abc-charset field: %%abc-charset iso-8859-1 (e) is cedilla C really to be \ c space c? Why not \c? This has also been corrected. It should have been \Cc and \,C on the one hand, and \cc and \,c on the other hand. Groeten, Irwin Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~* Chazzanut Online: http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] New draft special characters
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], I. Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Bernard Hill wrote: (a) I presume the list is not exhaustive. ie É (Capital E acute) and the The table only gives a number of examples for each class of supported accents. (b) I think we need a copyright symbol. \C or \OC. The second revision of the 2.0 draft (soon to be released) will solve this issue. Briefly, there will be defined a field called %%abc-copyright, in which any occurrence of the string (C) is to be replaced by the copyright symbol: %%abc-copyright (C) Copyright John Smith 2003 Maybe also R-in-a- circle although I don't know what it means. It means that you registered a trademark with the government trademarks bureau. (c) Why is £ \243? While I can of course implement it, it makes no sense. Ascii £ is 156. Watch out: 156 is decimal, while the number behind the backslash should be the octal code of the character, which is 234 (and _not_ 243, which was a typo!) Octal! I've not used that for 30 years, I would never have considered it in a PC environment. ... but maybe 243 was not a typo: it's the Latin-1 coding (decimal 163) for £. Bernard Hill Braeburn Software Author of Music Publisher system Music Software written by musicians for musicians http://www.braeburn.co.uk Selkirk, Scotland To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] New draft special characters
On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Bernard Hill wrote: Octal! I've not used that for 30 years, And I'm only 24 years old... I would never have considered it in a PC environment. It reveals the background of the ABC language, I guess... ... but maybe 243 was not a typo: it's the Latin-1 coding (decimal 163) for £. Now I double checked it, and you are correct! It should be octal codes according to the specified charset, which by default is Latin-1 Groeten, Irwin Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~* Chazzanut Online: http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] New draft special characters
Bernard Hill wrote: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], I. Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Watch out: 156 is decimal, while the number behind the backslash should be the octal code of the character, which is 234 (and _not_ 243, which was a typo!) Octal! I've not used that for 30 years, I would never have considered it in a PC environment. Yes that's always astonished me too. I guess it's something we've inherited from abc2mtext. I suppose TeX itself was probably started back in the 70s, on Digital machines which used a 12-bit word length. Octal made sense then, since four octal digits = 12 bits. Now we use 8-bit bytes, and multiples thereof, so we use hexadecimal as a shorthand for binary (two hex digits = 8 bits). The use of octal is laughably archaic today. Kind of like the unix man command. (Sorry guys, not wanting to start a platform-specific flame war, but I'm having to learn to love unix, and man in particular is driving me crazy.) Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] New draft special characters
On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 03:53:41PM +0100, Phil Taylor wrote: Bernard Hill wrote: In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], I. Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Watch out: 156 is decimal, while the number behind the backslash should be the octal code of the character, which is 234 (and _not_ 243, which was a typo!) Octal! I've not used that for 30 years, I would never have considered it in a PC environment. Yes that's always astonished me too. I guess it's something we've inherited from abc2mtext. (abcmtext ?? abcmtex, I guess) I don't think so. Because abc2mtex used the TeX escape sequences, \a etc, for anything that isn't 7-bit ASCII; that's where those character sequences came from. As I remember it, I think the obscure-numbers stuff started coming in when people started using 8-bit well-it-works-on-my-character-set codes directly in preference to the TeX sequences. (Sorry guys, not wanting to start a platform-specific flame war, but I'm having to learn to love unix, and man in particular is driving me crazy.) Have a look in uk.comp.os.linux - there's an argument going on with lots of people saying how much nicer man is, compared with info :-) (I confess, I agree). -- Richard Robinson The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] New draft special characters
I. Oppenheim writes: | | (c) Why is £ \243? While I can of course implement it, it makes no | sense. Ascii £ is 156. | From the iso_8859-1 man page: Oct Dec Hex Char Description ... 243 163 A3 £ POUND SIGN ... 251 169 A9 © COPYRIGHT SIGN One problem we seem to have is that people use \ followed by digits to mean octal, decimal, or hexadecimal. This is an ongoing point of confusion. There is, of course, a totally standard way that mathematicians indicate the numeric base, but since we can't do subscripting in plain text, we can't use it. There's a long tradition of software packages and programming languages using similar notation for all three bases, but interchanging their meanings. We could establish a standard abc way of indicating the base, and in fact a fair amount of abc software uses \243 to mean octal 243. But most of our users are not programmers, and they are using all sorts of software on all sorts of systems. So they will always be using whatever notation is standard with the software they're familiar with, and we will always be fighting this problem. (Depressing, ain't it? ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
