Henning Kiel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> schrieb:
| > James Allwright wrote:
| > >When I first introduced the V: field into abc2midi, the syntax was very
| > >simple:
| > >
| > >V:<voice number>
...
| > When I added the V: field to BarFly I considered that the voice which
| > follows a V: label was a part of the field, so I allowed it to follow
| > on directly after the space which delimits the number. This is nice,
| > because the voices get grouped closely together, and you can align
| > the notes vertically to make it easy to see which notes are playing
| > simultaneously. If you do this, however, you do have to allow inline
| > fields in the bit of the tune on the same line as the V: field.
...
| > BarFly doesn't require this; you can write the music either on the
| > same line as the V: field or on the following line, but the former
| > makes for compact and readable music, and I would like to retain it
| > as an option. (It's not difficult to program; you just have to treat
| > a space following the voice number as equivalent to a line end.)
|
| So then why not use inline V: fields for this case?
|
| [V: 1] ab g2 | fe
| [V: 2] g2 bf | d2
Well, I'd think that it would be useful, user-friendly, and all those
Good Things, to allow both this and
V:1 ab g2 | fe
V:2 g2 bf | d2
Both are emminently readable, simple to explain, and simple to parse.
And allowing the latter has one long-term advantage: It makes it very
difficult to complicate such V: lines with extra fields. I'd construe
this as an advantage. If we want to keep ABC readable, we probably
don't want anything more than the voice number inside the music.
We might go into another discussion of the contents of V: lines in
the header section. These V: lines should have whatever is needed to
describe the voices. At the very least, we should probably get an
agreement on exactly how to express the part's name(s), for display
and selection of MIDI voices and such. How abc2ps does this is:
V: 3 nm="Vl.I" name="Violin I"
V: 4 nm="Vl.II" name="Violin II"
Here, "name" is a full name, to put on the first line of a score or
the top of a page for that part; "nm" is an abbreviated name to be
used in lower lines of a score. This is in pretty good agreement with
common usage in orchestra and band music. Together with directives to
state the mapping of voices to staffs and the grouping of staffs,
this is sufficient to use abc voices for a very wide range of music.
Software would be free to ignore either or both of these names, of
course, since they are often irrelevant.
Not that we can't think of lots of other things that we want. The
main problem here is that it's guaranteed to degenerate into another
rambling, inconclusive discussion of transposition ...
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