Richard Robinson wrote:
>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). ...
No, as Richard says below, that's abc2win. Not that BarFly doesn't have
its own idiosyncracies of course...
>> 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.
>
As far as I remember abc2win does exactly what is proposed, i.e. ignores
line-breaks unless they are specifically marked with an exclamation mark.
Actually, this does not solve the problem of spurious line-ends inserted
during mailing. The real problem happens when the line end gets inserted
in the middle of a note symbol, separating an accidental from it's note,
or the note from its time value. I suppose though, if we had a separate
character to mark line ends programs could pre-process the abc to remove
all CRs and LFs before processing. Not a bad idea really. At least if
we used the exclamation mark we could stay compatible with all those
abc2win tunes out there.
Phil Taylor
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
