>> My theory is that once upon a time, the repeat sign consisted of two >> dots (:), and always coincided with a bar line. > An interesting theory, but I don't buy it because your symbol is > symmetrical and so you can't tell the difference between a start > repeat and a end repeat. Suppose your music has the form > A |: B :| C |: D :| E > you are now in big trouble if you can't tell the difference between > a start repeat and an end repeat.
Big trouble or not, you do find similar syntax in 18th century Scottish sources, both print (e.g. Aird) and manuscript. They often got by with only symmetric repeat signs. A section was repeated if you could find a repeat sign (or the start of the tune) at each end of it. Effectively the symmetric repeat was the normal double bar, with the simple double bar being a special case indicating *non*-repetition (which is the statistically efficient way to arrange things with that repertoire, since most sections do get repeated). There was a special left repeat sign only used in practice when you had a non-repeating upbeat at the very start. I tried being faithful to Aird's notation in the transcript on my site by using :: repeat signs at the ends of tunes. I think that crashed BarFly with a memory error every time and I didn't expect any other implementation to allow for such lunacy, so out it went. One 18th century layout which is genuinely useful is the ultra- compact tunebook format where tunes don't need to start on a new line (see Rogier's _Oude en Nieuwe Boerenlietjes en Contradansen_ for a well-done example). Lots of manuscripts use that, with a paper size rather larger than A5 in landscape format. This was meant to be pocket-sized for some sufficiently large value of "pocket". In that format you need something much more dramatic than a thin-thick bar to mark the end of a tune, so they used a series of parallel vertical lines starting the height of the staff and tapering down to a dot, or in manuscript a damped-harmonic- motion or Bessel function curve with 3 to 6 oscillations. The feature that often went along with this in manuscripts that you possibly don't want abc2ps to support is filling the book from both ends at once, opposite ways up. This was very common and nobody now knows why. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
