| I had been firmly in the pro-!foo! camp until I read Phil Taylor's | message. Having digested that information, I agree that it would be a | bad idea to break compatibility with abc2win files.
Well, I added a kludge to my jcabc2ps, so that my abc tune finder could handle both of these. I didn't find that it was a serious problem. The proposed use of !...! restricts the contents to just standard musical terms. Most of those are single words. The worst is !da Capo! which contains an embedded space. What my kludge does is scan for the matching !, and if it finds a newline, two or more spaces, or any of a list of specific chars that never occur in the allowed terms, it treats the ! as an abc2winism and drops it. If it finds the matching ! first, what it mostly does rignt now is act as if it had been "^..." and proceeds, except that the string is stored in a new variable next to the one that holds chords. I haven't progressed much past this point of kludgery, yet. But the point is that the conflict with abc2win's notation isn't really all that serious. | On the other hand, I still think that the lack of a way to represent | dynamics and certain other commonly-used symbols is ABC's biggest | handicap. We could get into a real debate over what's the most serious handicap in ABC. My vote would waver between the lack of endings other than first and second, and the lack of a way to notate non-classical key signatures. But of course I fixed those in my abc2ps clone. I'd put dynamics right up there, though I'd lump this together with the lack of other standard annotations. I'm sure others will make other suggestions. Let's hear from the crowds that really, really need a 4- or 6-line staff or alternate shapes for note heads ... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
