James Allwright writes: | On Fri 07 Dec 2001 at 01:38PM +0100, Simon Wascher wrote: | > | > I could *not* live with such a solution. It *must* be possible to use | > words for describing tempo whithout having to define them in numbers. | | A man's life hangs in the balance here, depending on the finer | points of abc syntax. Clearly this is important stuff. :-)
Yeah; I also had the image of Simon hanging himself in response to the New! Improved! ABC standard. In any case, we might point out again that the metronome was invented around 1820, and any metronome indication for earlier music is a modern editor's addition. So if ABC requires definitions of such terms, the result will be to lock out the entire Early Music crowd, who will be forbidden to do "urtext" ABC transcriptions. Such a rule would also invalidate a considerable body of current ABC files. I know that abc2ps casually accepts Q:"Allegro". It does seem to want the quotes; maybe I should fix that. I've seen this sort of Q line in quite a number of files. Accepting them makes a lot of sense. It's obviously a problem for a player, but no more of a problem than a tune with no Q line at all (which covers at least 90% of the ABC out there). After all, to a great many ABC users, R:reel is a perfectly good and sufficient tempo indicator. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
