Hi, Chris
You wrote:
> 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
Bryan Creer stated:
>Presumably Chris Drake will be told that
>if he thinks Fife & Drum notation is so important he should go off and
write
>his own software to do it (with midi generation).
I think Bryan is inclined to be a bit too optimistic: in fact you have just
been
ignored (as it usual when someone asks about something the developers on
this list don't need themselves).
Anyway, if you do not wish to spend some money on a full featured notation
software and wish to stuck to the typesetting music line, I would suggest to
try MusixTex. It can handle fancy things like beaming across bar lines and
symbols like the one you call roll, although I assume they might be a bit
tricky to handle, and of course offers a chance to define grace note
lengths, force stems up or down, write two voices on the same staff... -
i.e. all what any barely decent typesetting package to type music is
supposed to be able to do!
And don't be fooled by those that tell that the MusixTex
notation is cryptic - deserves some works on the tricky bits, where you have
to hack the tex file, but nearly all the rest of the work can be done with
pre-processors that are fairly easy to handle. Even the old good abc2mtex,
in case, even if the way it handles multistave scores is...how to say...
self defeating? And even if you are a Windows user, it is fairly easy to
install MusixTex and the related packages too (as far as you ignore the
confusing suggestions on the abc homepage and the related links).
Actually, I wonder what might have happened of the abc notation if,
following the original idea of Chris Walshaw to write a pre-processor to
MusixTex, rather than in developing an endless series of home made clones of
an homemade software like abc2ps the efforts of the developers which
monopolize this mailing list had been addressed in cooperation to update
abc2mtex to offer the whole community of the users (i.e. the musicians who
don't happen to be C developers, to quote Bryan) a tool they all could use,
each one to fulfill his own purpose...
Regards
Gianni
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