This is more a printing/notation question than anything else; it may not be
applicable to the ABC spec, but --
I'm interested in noting and printing fife & drum music, especially from the
19th century, and although the fife parts are fairly easy, the percussion
part is painful. Nothing seems to really produce anything that is readable,
or at least in a notation that modern players can understand. A small GIF is
attached to show what I'm up against...
One piece, the lead-in rolls, are essentially a string of grace notes that
cross a bar. This I can fake with abc2ps if I'm allowed to specify a zero-
length note. This results essentially in an invisible place-holder (the object
of the grace notes) which can be tied to a real note at the beginning of the
next measure. Some abc2ps versions seem to complain but accept it, others
choke up.
The other, more commonly used notation, is putting three diagonal slashes
through the staff of or below the note to signify a roll. *Nobody* prints
anything close to this.
Any suggestions? (I have run into a program called mup, Music Publisher,
which seems to print nicely, but the input syntax is closer to lilypond
than anything else).
- Chris Drake
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