On Mon, 16 Oct 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> John Atchley writes:
>
> | ... You have as much right to use K:^f as he does to unilaterally
> | decide that an exclamation point! is used for the end of a line (I think
> | it's Barfly that does that, if not I apologize, Phil). ...
>
> This reminds me: I've seen a lot trouble with line wrapping,
> including with the ongoing sugggestions that my tune finder is
> "broken" because it doesn't fix such problems. I've thought for some
> time that the "end of line is end of staff" rule is something that we
> could maybe work on ammending. I've seen a lot of abc with ! or * at
> the end of lines, in addition to the standard backslash. But I'm not
> at all sure what these other end-of-line marks might mean. Maybe it's
> time to document them, with the idea of maybe sneaking one or more
> into the standard. So what do they actually mean?
'*' is old abc, from abc2mtex using musictex, the era when 's' was a
slur-delimiter :- It worked with the end-of-line=end-of-staff, and said to
full-justify the resulting staff, in the days before musiXtex could be
used to do this automatically. I think some of mine probably still uses
this, I;'ve never noticed it have any effect on any other s/w (<chorus:
Aha ! An unused character, what can we do with it ?>
'!' seems to force a line-end in, I *think*, abc2win. I duno what we ought
to do about that. I've spent a lot of time re-editing abc2win output to
get it through abc2ps & friends, it would be nice not to (that and the
':|: construct).
> This is a rather trivial bit of syntax, but it is a real problem that
> we could fix with relatively little effort.
"Aha ! an unused character" - given that if '*' appears in any abc it's
already associated with an end-of-staff ... I've always liked the
simplicity of the EOL=EOS, but that's because most of the abc I use is
generated within my machine, it's not so nice with incoming material. I
think you're right here, it's something that should and could be fixed.
--
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem
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