Bryan Creer wrote:
>Phil Taylor says -
>
>>The system of using ^ and _ to
>>denote annotations over or under the staff was proposed by Wil Macaulay
>>about two years ago and incorporated in the next version of BarFly
>>(which also allows < and > to place the annotation to the left or right
>>of the note head when you want to annotate a particular note in a chord).
>>Most programs have followed suit.
>
>This is still a bodge of the guitar chord system and too little too late. It
>isn't safe to assume that any text within double quotes that doesn't start
>with one of those symbols is a chord.
The problem here lies not with the proposed mechanism, but with the fact
that the original (v1.5 abc) guitar chord format permitted abuse, and we
can't go back in time and change it retrospectively.
>>The only responsibility I acknowledge
>>towards the users is to make sure that it won't do them any harm
>>(carry viruses, corrupt their operating system etc).
>
>Well giving them software that produces "abc" that is inconsistent with any
>other abc isn't exactly doing them favours is it?
If it allows them to make transcriptions that can't be done any other
way then it's useful. If you want to make use of my transcription of the
Goldberg Variations then you will need a program that supports transposing
macros and user defined symbols. These things are in the proposed 1.76
standard, except that they have been confused and conflated to the
point where nobody really understands what has been proposed, so nobody
else has implemented them in a program. If you want to know how these
things should work, read:
http://rbu01.ed-rbu.mrc.ac.uk/barflystuff/bfextensions.html
(That page is not yet up to date with the current version, but you'll
get the idea.)
Phil Taylor
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