Gianni Cunich writes:
>In fact the statement I made about the abc transcriptions was that,
>in a number of cases, the transcriptions had to be either non faithful
>to the source or non abc standard compliant (an in some cases in fact
>they're both). A different statement, and a rather more articulated
>one for the matter, that Eric intended. And, as shown by the fact
>that nobody else actually has been so naive to argue about that issue,
>I wasn't expressing an opinion. I was jut talking about a matter
>of fact. Anybody who will take the care to have look at the real
>source book will be able to verify it! ;-).
>
It's not clear to me whether this is a question of the standard or
of the implementation. All the tunes could have been pretty faithfully
reproduced at that time by abc2mtex, with the exception, perhaps, of the
Irish tune names (I'm not sure if there's an uncial font available in TeX.
If there is, someone tell me where to find it. I never got Eirannach to
work.) One just has to use the letters H--Z (which Phil Taylor calls
re-definable symbols, because that's what they are, and which I call
user-definable macros for the same reason.) It's just a matter of writing
the necessary TeX/MusixTeX macros, and, although I didn't actually go the
the length of writing them down, I didn't notice anything that couldn't
have been done that way. Certainly mordents, turns, emphasis marks,
crescendo/decrescendo hairpins, tr, ff, pp, D.C., segnos, turns with
sharps stacked over them etc are all straightforward. However, the
transcriptions were for abc2ps, which doesn't support H--Z, so this wasn't
an option.
Since Chris wrote the standard (i.e. version 1.6) pretty much as a
description of what abc2mtex could do, it's hard to say those are not in
the standard. In the other hand, what the standard _does_ say about H--Z
is about as vague as it can be (it just says that users can use them to
define new notation) because, as Chris says, they are extremely
package-dependent, and, as he doesn't say, because, while their
implementation is trivial in abc2mtex, it is extremely difficult in other
packages like abc2ps.
I plead guilty to writing some of the non-compliant (but not, I
hope, non-faithful) transcriptions. I did this quite intentionally, hoping
somebody would notice, take the hint, and see that this capability is
needed. Thanks for noticing, at least.
John Chambers wrote:
>One of the strangest is the practice of putting a fermata over
>a bar line. It's not really obvious what this was intended
>to mean.
It means "Fine". Big fat period at the end of a sentence. This was one of
the ones that gave me a little pause when I claimed I can write macros for
all of O'Neill's stuff. While I'm sure I can write a macro to do it, I'm
not sure if I can do that and *also* write the bar line in the abc. I'd
have to look it up in the Musixtex docs.
>There is a dumb man that tells to a deaf man: "Hey, there's a blind man
looking at you!".
>Popular Italian joke.
>
"...said the blind carpenter as he picked up his hammer and saw."
Popular American joke.
Cheers,
John Walsh
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