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John Walsh writes:
| While I'm at it, I think it may also be useful to have invisible
| bar lines. These could be used in difficult cases to aid the alignment
| of notes between staves carrying different voices, or having different
| meters (in polyrhythmic music) or when there is M:none, or when for some
| other reason there were no barlines at all in one staff, as in some early
| music. An alternative is some sort of tab stop that one can put in the
| music to align the notes.
This is implemented in abc2ps with the notation [|]. I wonder how
many other abc tools understand this? I've used it in a few files,
since there are places where bar lines seem to be required but I
don't want a bar showing on the printed copy.
One thing that I wondered about a while back, but didn't get any
response from: I've seen music that uses a "broken bar", in the form
of short vertical dashes (either between the staff lines or crossing
them). This is useful, for instance, in an urtext edition in which
you'd like to cut the bars in half for readability, but you still
want to indicate which bar lines were in the original. It's also used
in Balkan and Middle Eastern music to break up long bars in complex
rhythms, again for readability. It seems to me that an isolated colon
not next to a bar line could very well be used for this purpose. It's
visually the same as the broken bar line, and doesn't seem to be in
conflict with any existing usage.
Hmmm ... maybe I should implement it and try using it. That would
tell me whether there's some subtle problem with the idea.
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