At 07:24 AM 14-02-01 +0000, Steve Mansfield wrote:
>The following is just thinking aloud, rather than a fully-reasoned
>thought, but ...
>
>It strikes me that we are up against the multiple uses that people put
>abc to here. Which, then, is preferable :
>
>(a) we cater for those who either play directly from the abc, or from
>notation generated by feeding the abc into Abc2Win, Barfly, abc2ps and
>all its mutations, Skink, etc ....
>
>If we take that route we can wrap up this debate here, because so long
>as we don't break the convention that anything in the " " is (or should
>be reproduced in the same position as) a chord, we're in the clear.
>
>or
>
>(b) we cater for those who feed abc into player programmes and make
>their primary use of the notation that way, in which case we do need a
>formalised standard of agreed chord notations.
>
>Personally I incline to (a). Chord notation is multifarious and varied,
>and my gut feeling is that that any attempt to standardise will become
>either over-prescriptive, in which case people will ignore it anyway, or
>hideously complicated and self-contradictory.
>
>I do, however, refer anyone who disagrees with that, to my first
>sentence :-)
First sentence duly noted - take this as my thinking aloud reply to your
thinking aloud comments.
I'd tend to go for (b) rather than (a) because (b) preserves the meaning
better. As you note, the meaning is important for player programs, but
I'd also argue it's important for printing programs as well. If a printing
program wants to transpose chords it has to have some concept of what
the chords mean. If it wants to print nice looking sharp and flat
symbols rather than 'b' and '#' it has to know what the chord means.
If you want an option to print a raised circle for a diminished chord
or a triangle for a 7th chord you have to know what the chord
means.
I don't have a problem with there being a mechanism in ABC to print
arbitrary text, but I don't want that to get caught up with the chord
notation.
Any program looking to do analysis will want to know what the chords
mean. By going with option (a) I think we'd be saying that abc is
purely for printing programs, and not even terribly good at that.
Bob
----------------------------------------------------------
-- Bob Archer [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
