James Allwright wrote
>On Tue 17 Jul 2001 at 08:17PM +0100, Phil Taylor wrote:
>>
>> You could, for example, use a macro to substitute the letter Q for
>> the text !invertedfermata! in the tune, and a suitable file of macros
>> would allow the program to support the !symbol! format proposed in
>> the draft standard. However, it's extremely clumsy, clutters up the
>> abc with stuff between exclamation marks, breaks lots of tunes written
>> by abc2win and is quite unnecessary, as you can already do this using
>> the annotation format "^inverted fermata" if you want. Furthermore,
>> enabling macros for display purposes means that ornaments will be written
>> out in full if they have associated macros, which is not usually what
>> you want.
>>
>
>I think there is a misunderstanding here. "^inverted fermata" will write
>the text "inverted fermata" above a note. This is just a way of getting
>text printed above a note. If you want to see an inverted fermata symbol,
>you need something that recognizes "invertedfermata" as a macro name
>and calls up the relevant symbol (the proposed behaviour of ! !).
No misunderstanding. I'm suggesting that you could use a macro to
recognise the text "^inverted fermata" and substitute the letter Q
for it before parsing, thus producing the symbol in the music.
Programs which don't know what an inverted fermata is would simply
write the text instead. As I understand it, that is how the !symbol!
syntax is supposed to work, but without the necessity of introducing
the exclamation mark.
>Perhaps if you post an explanation of your alternative system, I will
>see the beauty of it. My objections to having H-Z attached to fixed
>symbols is two-fold :
>
>1. It only allows us 19 different symbols.
In the same tune. There are an infinite number of symbols, but only
19 of them can be used in the same tune. And even then, if we allow
the U: field to be used within the tune we can break that limitation
should it ever be necessary.
>2. A single character is much more cryptic than a name enclosed in ! !
That is a valid criticism. On the other hand single characters interfere
less with the readability of the tune than multi-character instructions do.
Which is more important, the readability of the tune itself or the
readability of the ancillary markings?
In practice, the common symbols default to the values which most programs
now give them, so L = emphasis, H = fermata, M = mordent etc. It is
newly-introduced symbols which may cause you to have to look at the tune
header to find out what they are.
Phil Taylor
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