>> This ugly mess is the best I can do in BarFly to get those chords to line >> up with four crotchets in another voice while retaining the semibreve: >> >> V:1 "A" C4 "Am"y4 | >> V:2 GyGy Gy2G| >> >> and every additional voice would require quadratically more y's to sort >> the misalignments out. An example of why I don't show other people the >> ABCs I've written with y's in. > Not true. The timing of 'y' counts for vertical alignment only, so all > bars should contain the same total amount of time (and therefore the same > time value of ys) to align. Each additional voice will need to contain > exactly y4 (divided up appropriately to the notes) to keep the alignment > right
I was thinking of the problems I've had trying to use this in multi-part music like piano scores. The difficulty is exactly that each part needs enough y's to make this peculiar notional elapsed time match up: you introduce a few y's to sort out the spacing problems in one voice, then find that another one has gone wrong in the process and you need to find somewhere to put the y's in that, then you need a few more to even things up, so you put corresponding y's in the last part you worked on to make things add up again, then you find that text syllables overlap, so you put more y's in the vocal part to spread them out, and parallel extra y's in all the other parts, then you find that a guitar chord collides with something... AAARGH!!! It's nearly always possible to get a readable score eventually, but the source that generates it isn't something you'd want to look at. So I try not to use y unless I absolutely have to. I think the longest it's ever taken me, per bar, transcribe something into ABC was a short song with guitar chords I did with the songwriter sitting beside me. I ended up with about half the score made up of y's to get the precise alignments he wanted. In theory a TeX-based system ought to obviate this kind of problem, as TeX uses elastic boxes, ugliness scores and heuristics to optimize its layout, and if an abc-to-TeX translator left TeX enough options that could be put to use. Has anybody hacked abc2mtex to deal with stuff like multiple voices or text underlay? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ food intolerance data & recipes, freeware Mac logic fonts, and Scottish music To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
