>>>>> "Wil" == Wil Macaulay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Wil> Interesting! Laura, your attachment can through just fine, so
Wil> I ran it through Skink, which parsed it but went into a hard
Wil> loop when asked to display the tune, because it can't handle
Wil> the double whole note (G16 at the end). How _should_ that
Wil> note be displayed?
A double whole note (also called breve) in modern notation is usually
a whole note with two short lines on either side. There's also a
notation that some people call Baroque, although it was used both
earlier and later than the Baroque period, where the note is square
instead of round.
Wil> and in general, since you can specify arbitrary note lengths
Wil> in abc, is there any consensus on how something like
Wil> X:1
Wil> T:Wierd lengths
Wil> L:1/8
Wil> M:C
Wil> K:C
Wil> a5 b9 c11 a17
Wil> should be displayed?
The consensus of most of the programs I've run into is that they give
an error message and give up. abc2ps used to print a whole note when
a length longer than a dotted whole was specified; I think more recent
versions do something less desirable.
It's certainly a bug if the program hangs or crashes.
I think it would be nice if the standard specified that any length up
to 6 whole notes (4 whole notes is called a longa, and printed like a
breve with a tail, so six would be a dotted longa) could be entered
and a program that didn't know how to display a given length would
parse it into tied shorter notes. This would allow users to enter
breves and longas for the programs that displayed them, and still get
reasonable printout out of other programs.
Currently the only program I know of that prints breves is abctab2ps,
and I don't think it does longas yet.
And yes, I sent that note on purpose to see if anyone would notice.
--
Laura (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.laymusic.org : Putting live music back in the living room.
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