Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again
On Fri, 4 Jul 2003 02:37:43 -0400 (EDT), Jeff Bigler [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [snip] P.S. While we're on the subject of the !...! commands, does anyone know why the mezzo piano dynamic was left out? I.e., !mp! is not in the 1.7.6 draft standard, and abcm2ps doesn't implement it. (I had to add it by hand to deco.c, as follows.) With abcm2ps, the standard way is: %%deco mp 6 pf 20 2 5 mp -- Ken ar c'hentañ | ** Breizh ha Linux atav! ** | http://moinejf.free.fr/ Pépé Jef| mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again
On Mon, 7 Jul 2003, Jack Campin wrote: Braille devices usually work one line at a time, so it helps if that line both forms a musically meaningful unit and is also not cluttered up with noise symbols like !break!. Come on, how much noise does a * make? 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] bloody ! again
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Jack Campin [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Which was a booboo on the part of whoever let that through. Supporting the existing corpus of tunes is *alone* more important than allowing an inessential idiosyncratic extension in one application. THAT has to be a good principal for a future standard. 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] bloody ! again
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], John Chambers [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Possibly we could just add a warning about this problem to the standard (perhaps in an Implementation Suggestions section), and suggest this approach for dealing with it. SOunds good to me. 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] bloody ! again
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Jeff Bigler [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2003 23:42:01 +0100 From: Jack Campin [EMAIL PROTECTED] According to the BNF definition http://www.norbeck.nu/abc/abcbnfx.htm The bang is NOT a line terminator Which was a booboo on the part of whoever let that through. IOW the ! simulates a line break. It does in ABC2WIN, but as far as I know it doesn't yet in any other application. Which is a pain in the bum because it's a really good idea and far more useful in the long term than the !...! constructs. Unfortunately, there's ABC out there that uses the !...! constructs, and other ABC out there that expects ! to be a line terminator. As far as I know, only abc2win has so far used ! as a line terminator, and the !...! extensions already exist in the 1.7.6 draft standard, which most people on this list seem to agree should be the starting point for the new 2.0.0 standard. This would argue for keeping !...! as part of standard ABC, and making ! as line terminator nonstandard. If this happens, I see several options for abc2win: I'm more interested in the standard. However we do have to recognise that many tunes out there use the abc2win standard. 1) Keep ! as a line terminator and don't implement the !...! extensions. This would make abc2win a nonstandard implementation. 2) Allow both. Program abc2win to look first for all of the !...! commands that are defined in the standard. Any ! that is not part of one of these commands is interpreted as a line terminator. (Even if the standard never mentions ! as a possible forced line break character, I like this option as a piece of defensive programming.) This probably wouldn't break many ABC files (if any), because the odds of having two line breaks with only a few characters in between is slim. (Besides that, the only !...! commands that I see that contain legal ABC in between are !D.C.!, !f!, !ff!, !fff!, and !!.) No, that's a bad idea. It does not allow for extensions to these symbols. If I write a program to test for all standard !..! comments then my program breaks as soon as another is added to the standard or a different program starts to recognise them. What we want from the standard is that new features will not cause old programs to crash. Or perhaps I should say future new features will not cause current programs to crash. 3) Use another character for either the escape character for either extensions (e.g., +...+ instead of !...!) or as a line terminator. This would also make abc2win a nonstandard implementation, and would definitely break some (possibly many) existing ABC files. In terms of adding a forced line break to the standard, several people have talked about preserving the few ASCII characters that are as yet undesignated in ABC for something important. I think having a unique forced line break character may well be useful enough to warrant using one of them. What would folks think of using for this purpose? Jeff P.S. While we're on the subject of the !...! commands, does anyone know why the mezzo piano dynamic was left out? I.e., !mp! is not in the 1.7.6 draft standard, and abcm2ps doesn't implement it. (I had to add it by hand to deco.c, as follows.) g I had already implemented in my upcoming abc reader as it's an obvious omission. 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] bloody ! again
On Fri, 4 Jul 2003, Jeff Bigler wrote: What would folks think of using for this purpose? The ampersand is already in use as a voice splitting symbol. I hope this will be documented in the upcomming standard. I.e., !mp! is not in the 1.7.6 draft standard Good that you mentioned that. Must have been an oversight. 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] bloody ! again
Someone wrote: According to the BNF definition http://www.norbeck.nu/abc/abcbnfx.htm The bang is NOT a line terminator Jack Campin wrote: Which was a booboo on the part of whoever let that through. Supporting the existing corpus of tunes is *alone* more important than allowing an inessential idiosyncratic extension in one application. The BNF definition in abcbnfx.htm was an attempt from my side to describe the (at that time, 1997) proposed extensions in BNF. It does contain the ! as a line breaker, but only at the end of a line, not in the middle of it. I hadn't understood until today that it was actually allowed in the middle of a line too. BTW, nobody reacted to that specification for more than five years, so whose is the booboo? Now I've actually made a new, much more strict BNF specification of Abc 2.0, see separate mail. Henrik Norbeck, Stockholm, Sweden [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.norbeck.nu/ My home page http://www.norbeck.nu/abcmus/ AbcMus player program http://www.norbeck.nu/abc/ 1900 ABC tunes http://www.norbeck.nu/blackthorn Irish trad music band http://www.rfod.se/folklink/ Links to Swedish trad music To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again
As far as I know, only abc2win has so far used ! as a line terminator, and the !...! extensions already exist in the 1.7.6 draft standard, Which is not much more than a renamed absm2ps manual. which most people on this list seem to agree should be the starting point for the new 2.0.0 standard. If some bits of it are thrown out first. If this happens, I see several options for abc2win: This is the wrong way to look at it. abc2win is barely being maintained, but tunes created with its aid are the largest single corpus on the web. It's the tunes you need to care about, not the software. 1) Keep ! as a line terminator and don't implement the !...! extensions. This would make abc2win a nonstandard implementation. It already is in many respects. The problem is mainly a pragmatic one (though as I have been arguing, having ! as a line terminator allows important things you can't do any other way). 3) Use another character for either the escape character for either extensions (e.g., +...+ instead of !...!) or as a line terminator. This would also make abc2win a nonstandard implementation, and would definitely break some (possibly many) existing ABC files. There are very few existing files using the abcm2ps !...! construct compared with the number that use ! as a terminator. And since the uses of this construct are finitely enumerable, there is no reason why abcm2ps (or some utility supporting it) can't auto-edit them into something else. Since any ABC can occur between two terminators, it would be much harder for abc2win to change its behaviour, or for a utility to transform them automatically, even if the implementor wanted to do such a thing (not likely). I think having a unique forced line break character may well be useful enough to warrant using one of them. What would folks think of using for this purpose? Look at the example I just gave. The reason ! worked so well for it was because it's visually unobtrusive. isn't. Better to let abcm2ps have for whatever it wants to do with a new character, since source readability doesn't seem to be an issue for people who use it. - 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. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again
I know it is fasionable to slag off abc2win on this list (and, obviously, I'm not too keen on it or I wouldn't be writing Abacus) but can we get a little historical perspective? >From Chris Walshaw's history of ABC on his abc home page - The real explosion in interest came when Jim Vint released his package abc2win in September 1995. The tool was taken up by a large number of the members of IRTRAD-L and abc's of tunes started appearing regularly. More recently (in February 1996) Michael Methfessel released abc2ps... and from ABC Music Notation: History written by a certain John Chambers - 1995 September Jim Vint's abc2win version ___ announced for Windows 3.?. 1997 January Version 1.6.1 of abctmtex This may have been the version used to write the first ABC syntax standard, first as a narrative description, and then in BNF format by Henrik Norbeck. There is no mention that I can find of when the !...! notation was introduced or when standard 1.7.6 was released as a draft but it looks as if abc2win has a prior claim on "!". I don't see how Jim Vint can be accused of "gratuitous violations" of a standard that didn't even exist. The fact is that both "!" as a line break and "!...!" are in use so let's develop a no blame culture and work out how to get round it. More to the point, can we try and work out a system to make sure we all know what others are doing so this sort of thing doesn't happen in the future? Bryan Creer
Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again
On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 06:26:16AM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There is no mention that I can find of when the !...! notation was introduced or when standard 1.7.6 was released as a draft but it looks as if abc2win has a prior claim on !. I don't see how Jim Vint can be accused of gratuitous violations of a standard that didn't even exist. The fact is that both ! as a line break and !...! are in use so let's develop a no blame culture and work out how to get round it. More to the point, can we try and work out a system to make sure we all know what others are doing so this sort of thing doesn't happen in the future? I hated abc2win's ! usage when it appeared. ABC tunes started appearing using some consruct I'd never heard of, never seen any discussion of, that the software I was using just wouldn't handle. If I wanted to look at an abc2win tune, I had to re-edit it by hand before any of the programs I was using could make sense of it. I saw it, and still see it, as the prime example of what a pain in the arse it is when people implement their own bright ideas for extensions with no concensus. It broke compatability quite horribly, and wasted manymany hours of my time, and probably other peoples' too. But I gather that jcabc2ps, at least, now copes with this (? I really haven't been keeping up) so maybe I won't have to do any more re-editing. On the assumption that I'm _able_ to use ! as a staff-break, anywhere in a line of abc, Jack's argument examples make the case very strongly, to my mind, that this is a good and useful thing to be able to do. I might even start using it myself, if I could be sure other peoples' software would know what it meant. Just so long as we end up with agreement, among both people and software, about what things mean ... -- 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] bloody ! again
Bryan Creer writes: | and from ABC Music Notation: History written by a certain John Chambers - ... | There is no mention that I can find of when the !...! notation was introduced | or when standard 1.7.6 was released as a draft but it looks as if abc2win has | a prior claim on !. I don't see how Jim Vint can be accused of gratuitous | violations of a standard that didn't even exist. Anyone have dates for these? | The fact is that both ! as a line break and !...! are in use so let's | develop a no blame culture and work out how to get round it. More to the point, | can we try and work out a system to make sure we all know what others are | doing so this sort of thing doesn't happen in the future? One of the inherent problems with all software development by more than one small group is that people will try new ideas, often incompatible with each other, and then you get input using all of them. If caught early, and everyone is cooperative, it's easy to pick the winner and convert everyone else's files. But this isn't always what happens. In this case, we have an example of something that has been the bane of the computing industry since at least the late 1950s: Even if a lot of people agree on an industry standard, people working on the market leader systems (IBM and then Microsoft) tend to simply ignore the standard. We're the standard; all you nobodies can just follow our lead or you'll have a mess on your hands. And since the market leader usually doesn't fully document their standard, anyone trying to follow them has a very difficult job. It took me a long time to grok what all those funny ! chars meant, because they weren't documented anywhere, and the information I could find was quite confusing. Were they line or staff terminators? Recent comments here still confuse the two, but to a programmer, this is important. I finally figured out they could just be ignored. Then the !...! notation came along. This wasn't surprising, because most abc users had never heard of abc2win's use of !, and there was no mention of it in any abc docs. ! was an unused character, so why not use it? This mess isn't always intended, especially when done by independents like Jim Vint. I think he just saw it as a bother and a waste of his time. But to others who can't read minds, it does often come across as the traditional arrogance of the market leader to industry standards. Well, at least in this case, there's a kludge that distinguishes the abc2win ! from the musical annotation !...! notation. And this is in the tradition of the computing industry too; kludges like that are how we usually handle the market leaders' violations of standards. BTW, a year or so back, I had my tune finder's search bot count the tunes that seemed to come from abc2win (because of the ! chars, or because they had a % ... abc2win comment). It came to between 9 and 10% of the tunes. It probably is the numeric leader (since the true leader is tunes created using any of a zillion text editors), but it's not anywhere approaching a majority. It would take less work to convert the abc2win tunes to the standard. The best way would be to produce a new abc2win that does the conversion automatically. If it has some useful new features (inline key changes, clefs, voices), it could be widely adopted, and the non-conforming tunes would slowly fade away. Anyone want the job? Maybe I should revive that code and do another count ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again
John Chambers wrote - BTW, a year or so back, I had my tune finder's search bot count the tunes that seemed to come from abc2win. Maybe I should revive that code and do another count ... Could you count the tunes that use !! ? Bryan Creer To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again
This is the wrong way to look at it. abc2win is barely being maintained, but tunes created with its aid are the largest single corpus on the web. It's the tunes you need to care about, not the software. ok, I guess that *almost* all of those tunes are from folk tradition. Do you honestly think we can live with or without those line breaks ? Since this fashion was introduced by abc2win (I started learning and discovering abc with it and I'm grateful to this software) and abc2win doesn't support multivoice and advanced features, I strongly doubt it will be very annoying if the future softwares miss this feature. So far I haven't found that many tunes with ! for line break (yes, I collect them all). Btw the first one I found is this one (it's just an example, and contrary to what I said it's not folk music) : X: 3 T:Foots Minuet. BC.03 M:3/4 L:1/4 R:Minuet O:England A:x N:There was a Samuel Foote,1720-1777, wit,playwright,and actor,just like N:in Blackadder! Z:vmp.John Bagnall K:D a f a | g2 f | e d e | f/e/f/g/f/g/ | a f a | trg2 f | e d e | f3 :|!: f f f |e/d/e/f/ e | g g g | f/e/f/g/ f | a/g/f/g/a/b/ | trg2 f | d/e/ f e | d3 |] (from village music...) I processed it in abc2win (yes I still have it :) ) to see the difference with it and without it. I don't think it's showing too much disrespect for the transcriver to forget this line break : probably 90% of line break are for showing a new part (can be done with P: instead). In case of classical / baroque etc. partition, it can be usefull, it's less the case in trad. folk music. It's not vital. Can someone find a counter example ? There are very few existing files using the abcm2ps !...! construct compared with the number that use ! as a terminator. From the demonstration we got recently, the !code! and ! will always be incompatible. I don't find !code! so great to enter, but it can be usefull, much more usefull than this kind of line break. I think the tunes using !...! notation provide more informations in themself with those !...! than the line break to emphasize a new part. If some programmers can be smart enought to include in their software an option (checkbox to emulate the old abc2win option :) )to support this ! line break, why not. But it shouldn't be the only option to write it. I remember the * symbol was ought to mean justification. I found few applications that support it. Why not consider this one as a new line break notation ? I don't think it's used somewhere else. !br! could also be used :) Better to let abcm2ps have for whatever it wants to do with a new character, since source readability doesn't seem to be an issue for people who use it. hmm, that's your opinion... I personally do type all my abc by hand... but I can say on the other hand I don't mind rediscuss the !...! to an other kind of notation. +...+ wouldn't annoy me for example, or even a complete way to symbolise this. Why not the macros the way Barfly implement them ?, if it's possible to use them for such notation, and if it doesn't give a unreadable result as the U: does (I still prefer a !...! notation than some I J etc. mixing with notes written with letters). I've managed to install a mac emulator and I tried BarFly yesterday. I'll try that macro thing, to see how it can be used. ___ Do You Yahoo!? -- Une adresse @yahoo.fr gratuite et en français ! Yahoo! Mail : http://fr.mail.yahoo.com To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again
Bryan Creer writes: | John Chambers wrote - | | BTW, a year or so back, I had my tune finder's search bot count the | tunes that seemed to come from abc2win. | | Maybe I should revive that code and do another count ... | | Could you count the tunes that use !! ? Since the code scans each tune, I can count anything that I can write a perl pattern for. A search does take several days (mostly due to the time spent making and breaking TCP connections), and I usually run it twice a month. A run just finished a couple days ago. So we're not talking about fast turnaround here. But I have added an assortment of counts like this, just out of curiosity. Then I say How 'bout dat. and delete the code. Usually the numbers come with disclaimers. Thus, I have the three books of the O'Neill's Project on my web site. A lot of them were done by people using abc2win, of course. But I ran them through a script to do some simple canonicalization, to try to make the abc as standard as possible. So they mostly show no signs of what software was used to do the transcription. This probably decreases the abc2win count by an unknown amount. Similar disclaimers would apply to any other such count. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again
Bryan Creer writes: | and from ABC Music Notation: History written by a certain John Chambers - ... | There is no mention that I can find of when the !...! notation was introduced | or when standard 1.7.6 was released as a draft but it looks as if abc2win has | a prior claim on !. I don't see how Jim Vint can be accused of gratuitous | violations of a standard that didn't even exist. Anyone have dates for these? A scan through my abc users mailbox indicates that the 1.7 standard was first discussed on this list in April 2000, and this included discussion of the !...! notation. I don't know when this was first implemented in a program though. BTW, a year or so back, I had my tune finder's search bot count the tunes that seemed to come from abc2win (because of the ! chars, or because they had a % ... abc2win comment). It came to between 9 and 10% of the tunes. It probably is the numeric leader (since the true leader is tunes created using any of a zillion text editors), but it's not anywhere approaching a majority. It would take less work to convert the abc2win tunes to the standard. The best way would be to produce a new abc2win that does the conversion automatically. If it has some useful new features (inline key changes, clefs, voices), it could be widely adopted, and the non-conforming tunes would slowly fade away. Anyone want the job? Maybe I should revive that code and do another count ... If you can figure out a way to do it, count the number of tunes which use the !...! construct too. I think you will find that those account for less than 1% of the total. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again
John Chambers wrote: BTW, a year or so back, I had my tune finder's search bot count the tunes that seemed to come from abc2win (because of the ! chars, or because they had a % ... abc2win comment). It came to between 9 and 10% of the tunes. It probably is the numeric leader (since the true leader is tunes created using any of a zillion text editors), but it's not anywhere approaching a majority. But that's not a good way to see how many people actually produce their tunes using abc2win, because 90% of abc2win users probably never inserted a hard line break in a tune, and maybe didn't even know it was possible. That's why I don't like the current abc standard for line breaks, because mostly hard line breaks are not needed. Henrik Norbeck, Stockholm, Sweden [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.norbeck.nu/ My home page http://www.norbeck.nu/abcmus/ AbcMus player program http://www.norbeck.nu/abc/ 1900 ABC tunes http://www.norbeck.nu/blackthorn Irish trad music band http://www.rfod.se/folklink/ Links to Swedish trad music To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again
John Chambers writes: Bryan Creer writes: | John Chambers wrote - | | BTW, a year or so back, I had my tune finder's search bot count the | tunes that seemed to come from abc2win. | | Maybe I should revive that code and do another count ... | | Could you count the tunes that use !! ? Since the code scans each tune, I can count anything that I can write a perl pattern for. While checking that, you might also check for * at the line ends. Abc2mtex used for that a right-justified line break. It became nearly superfluous when MusixTeX was introduced, but it's still mentioned in the 1.6.1 docs. I know I used it on some session tune files I put on the web in '94. (Of course, it won't be in that many tunes since it had to be entered by hand, as opposed to having the program automatically add it.) Cheers, John Walsh To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again
On Thu, 3 Jul 2003, Bernard Hill wrote: As a programmer I'm very concerned about ! as a line terminator. Now add two line terminators (presumably not illegal) abc abc|!trill! abc abc|! abc abc |! abc abc| According to the BNF definition http://www.norbeck.nu/abc/abcbnfx.htm The bang is NOT a line terminator; the newline (\n) terminates the INPUT line. When a bang appears at the very END of such an input line, it forces a line break in the music OUTPUT. 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] bloody ! again
In message [EMAIL PROTECTED], I. Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes On Thu, 3 Jul 2003, Bernard Hill wrote: As a programmer I'm very concerned about ! as a line terminator. Now add two line terminators (presumably not illegal) abc abc|!trill! abc abc|! abc abc |! abc abc| According to the BNF definition http://www.norbeck.nu/abc/abcbnfx.htm The bang is NOT a line terminator; the newline (\n) terminates the INPUT line. When a bang appears at the very END of such an input line, it forces a line break in the music OUTPUT. I don't understand what you are saying at all. According to a previous writer, abc abc|!bcd bcd| is equivalent to abc abc| bcd bcd| IOW the ! simulates a line break. When a bang appears at the very END of such an input line, it forces a line break in the music OUTPUT. The end itself forces a line break, no? 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] bloody ! again
On Thu, 3 Jul 2003, Bernard Hill wrote: According to the BNF definition http://www.norbeck.nu/abc/abcbnfx.htm The bang is NOT a line terminator; the newline (\n) terminates the INPUT line. When a bang appears at the very END of such an input line, it forces a line break in the music OUTPUT. I don't understand what you are saying at all. According to a previous writer, abc abc|!bcd bcd| is equivalent to abc abc| bcd bcd| IOW the ! simulates a line break. No, that is the idiosyncrasy of the ABC2WIN program or what it was called. It is obvious that that won't work together with the !...! notation. On the contrary, the way it is defined in the above BNF standard (have you actually read it?) works quite well. When a bang appears at the very END of such an input line, it forces a line break in the music OUTPUT. The end itself forces a line break, no? The newline only marks the end of the INPUT line; where the line breaks will be in the resulting OUTPUT is up to the software to decide. If the user wants to overrule the default layout algorithm, he can force a line break by ending the input line with a ! I hope it's now a bit more clear... 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] bloody ! again
[!...!] is peculiar to abcm2ps It's in the new standard 1.6 and will completely screw up ABC2WIN (which uses ! as a line terminator). Strikes me that it's abc2win which is up the gum tree for this one. And I find very strange stuff in abc2win: a) +..+ for chords b) the writing of grace notes as 1/16th notes rather than 1/8th as below c) doesn't allow change of metre/key in the middle The second has nothing to do with ABC, it's a display issue. The first is no longer an issue; ABC2WIN users stopped doing it years ago (it was in a very old ABC standard). The last is a limitation of the sort many implementations have; in this case it doesn't matter because (if it's still there) ABC2WIN can't process *any* ABC representation of the music, whatever syntax we were to choose to represent key/metre change. It isn't the syntax that's boggling the program, it's the music itself. But there are thousands of tunes out there using ! as a line terminator; like it or not, that is one feature of ABC2WIN's syntax that caught on. They matter more than any one application. - 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. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again
According to the BNF definition http://www.norbeck.nu/abc/abcbnfx.htm The bang is NOT a line terminator; the newline (\n) terminates the INPUT line. When a bang appears at the very END of such an input line, it forces a line break in the music OUTPUT. Apparently that's not true of the program (abc2win) in which this usage started, since you can find abc2win files on the net with exclamation marks in mid-line. How did this usage (exclamation mark at the end of line) get into the BNF definition anyway, since it has never been part of the abc standard? Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again
According to the BNF definition http://www.norbeck.nu/abc/abcbnfx.htm The bang is NOT a line terminator Which was a booboo on the part of whoever let that through. Supporting the existing corpus of tunes is *alone* more important than allowing an inessential idiosyncratic extension in one application. I don't understand what you are saying at all. According to a previous writer, abc abc|!bcd bcd| is equivalent to abc abc| bcd bcd| IOW the ! simulates a line break. It does in ABC2WIN, but as far as I know it doesn't yet in any other application. Which is a pain in the bum because it's a really good idea and far more useful in the long term than the !...! constructs. - 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. -- off-list mail to j-c rather than abc at this site, please -- To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [abcusers] bloody ! again
Jack Campin writes: | | But there are thousands of tunes out there using ! as a line terminator; | like it or not, that is one feature of ABC2WIN's syntax that caught on. | They matter more than any one application. I've had to face this with my tune finder's scripts. What I did was to add some rather simple code to abc2ps to try to spot these abc2win bangs and ignore them, while accepting the !...! terms that look like musical annotations. The heuristic when a ! is encountered is to scan for another and count any special characters. If any bar-line chars ([|:]) are spotted, it's immediately taken as an abc2win ! and dropped. If no matching ! is found, it's also dropped. This is somewhat crude, but it seems to work. So if we look at an example like an earlier one: | abc abc |!fff!fff!def def | The first ! would be taken as the start of !fff!, which is a valid annotation. The third ! fails on both tests, so it's an abc2win !. This gives: | abc abc |!fff!fffdef def | This was probably not what was intended, but it's valid abc notation. Of course, abc2win output doesn't contain !...! annotations. We should note that abc2win's ! does not found only at the end of a line. I've seen them in the middle of lines. And I've seen lines with two of them (one near the beginning and one near or at the end of the line). When ! is inside a line, there is almost always a | somewhere to the right. Possibly we could just add a warning about this problem to the standard (perhaps in an Implementation Suggestions section), and suggest this approach for dealing with it. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
