Steve Mansfield asks:
| Mention of the standards committee prompts the thought :
Y'know, I haven't received any email from them recently. Either
there's no current activity, or I've been dropped from the mailing
list. Maybe I should ask. Probably no need to, though, since all of
the committee are on this list.
| Where's the standards committee up to? Are we any closer to putting some
| of the current incompatibilities and bifurcations to the vote?
As far as I'm aware, the activity so far has been mostly to work on a
more formal "baseline" standard that matches Chris's 1.6 doc.
| And, in the mean time, can I take this opportunity to repeat my request
| for some kind person to point me at the URL of the page someone put
| together recently about the differences and similarities between the two
| (+?) versions of the V: field?
I've been experimenting a bit in my tune finder's clone of abc2ps, to
see how much of the extant V: lines I can get it to handle
automatically. So far, I think there's actually no important
incompatibility other than the old "octave" question (whether bass
lines need zillions of commas). The rest of the V: clauses can simply
be merged. The proposed middle= clause seems a very usable solution
to the octave that also has the benefit of allowing people like me to
define things like French violin clef and various other non-standard
note-to-staff mappings.
I'm still contemplating a heuristic to try to discover which mapping
was used when there's no middle= clause, but I haven't implemented it
yet. Maybe I should get at it.
There are some things in V: lines that I don't understand and are
currently ignored by my abc2ps clone. Maybe I should make up a list
of them and ask what they mean. So far, ignoring them seems to have
worked. I suspect they have something to do with producing sound
files, which abc2ps doesn't do, so they may not be significant to me.
I have seem some symptoms of people who have discovered the V: lines
and are using them without invoking any abc software. That is, V:
lines are being used to communicate to other human readers of the
abc. I suspect that there are more abc readers about than many of us
might guess. For someone who doesn't read music, abc may be easier to
learn than standard staff notation. This would, of course, lead to a
lot of "illegal" V: lines in the abc that we see on a number of music
mailing lists.
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