Atte wrote: | On 30 Jan 2002, Laura Conrad wrote: | > I agree that in ABC, where the assumption is that what the user enters | > is what a printing program should print, it's a bug. This is a case | > which does demand some special code. | > | > Alternatively, the standard could address the problem in such a way | > as to cause the bug to be in abc2ps and friends for printing the | > second sharp in the version with both F's sharped. | | Or both! What I love about abc is that you type the same as you would | write on a piece of music paper. Why not have both | | CDE^F- | F | | and | | CDE^F- | ^F | | print the same way (actually as the top one) and play or midify the same | (as the second one). Another way to put this is that the second "^" in ex | 2 is optional.
Well, I'd object to this, on the grounds that a music formatter should show exactly what I tell it, and not try to outsmart me. If a program displays accidentals where I didn't write them, I'd consider it a very serious bug. I wouldn't use the software until this was fixed. I don't need to waste time trying to figure out how to trick it into putting accidentals where I want them. It is widely understood that, in the case of ties, you don't need to write the accidentals in subsequent measures. This isn't much more than an extension of the old "accidentals apply for the rest of the measure" rule. If a note has an accidental, it applies to the end of the note, as well as to the end of the measure. I've long treated this as rather poor notation, and I prefer to write the accidentals. The reason is that I've seen cases where people think that the missing accidental(s) in music like CDE^F- | FGFE mean that there's a change of note after the bar line. So I'd put in the sharp or natural on the second F, to make sure that some dummy doesn't get it wrong. I'm well aware that the conventional interpretation of this is: CDE^F- | ^FG=FE I'm also aware that some musicians don't understand this, so I like to use "advisory" accidentals in such cases. But I wouldn't want to use software that inserts such accidentals automatically. I'm a bit curious about claims that abc2ps and clones do this right or wrong. For music formatters, it's irrelevant, because smudges on paper (or pixels on a screen) don't have a pitch. It does matter for a music player, of course, and I'd hope that implementers understand what the default behavior should be. It might also be useful to have an option for this, just as there should be an option in players to override the "rest of measure" rule and apply accidentals to only the one note. One curious aspect to this is that abc's notation for ties and slurs are visibly different. This isn't true for printed music, where commercial printers have inconsistent ways of distinguishing them (and some printers don't distinguish them at all). Thus, in some printed music, ties are thicker than slurs, while in other music, slurs are thicker than ties. Some printers put ties visibly closer to the note heads than slurs, while others don't. And so on. This is a problem with commercially printed music, but not in abc. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
