: I've never seen music written without the end of a line ending a bar. This is standard practice in 18th century manuscripts. You kept writing until you'd filled the line with notes and continued on the next one. You also see it in most tonic sol-fa vocal scores for songs in regular metre and phrasing: the line breaks in the music are defined by the text.
> some musicians seemed to think that staffs had to have bar lines at > the end, and some even think that bar lines are forbidden at the > beginning. I presume you're alluding to what you do in your own tunes in that last sentence. What you're doing is pushing what ought to be a decision of typographical style into the ABC source and screwing its semantics up in the process: i.e. if you end a line *of ABC* with a | symbol and start the next line *of ABC* with another one, you have introduced an empty bar. Two problems that creates: - error checkers will complain about it, thereby making it unnecessarily difficult to spot real errors in the noise. - if the reader wants to change the number of notes per line in the staff notation (e.g. by switching between landscape and portrait format) they are required to do additional editing of the ABC. If you want your typesetting software to put barlines at the start of each line as a purely graphical feature, with no musical significance, that's fine, but don't coerce the ABC into representing it. It's on the same semantic level as having little piles of snow on the title font for Christmas carols. Here's one of your transcriptions: X: 2 P: Johnnie's friends are never pleased R: reel B: RSCDS 12-__(I) Z: 1977 by John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://eddie.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/ N: Neil Gow's Repository Part 4 M: C| L: 1/8 K: G F \ | "G"G3g BGB2 | "Em"BEBA "Am"GE"D7"EF \ | "G"G3g BGB2 | "A7"AEAG "D"FDDF | | "G"G3g BGB2 | "Em"BEBA "Am"GE"D7"EF \ | "G"GF"/F"GA "Em"GAB^c | "A7"dABG "D"FD D || || g \ | "C"e/f/g"G"dg BGB2 | "B7"BEBA "Em"GE E g \ | "C"e/f/g"G"dg BGB2 | "A7"AEAG "D"FD D g | | "C"e/f/g"G"dg BGB2 | "B7"BEBA "Em"GE E g \ | "C"eg"G"dg "Am"cg"G"Bg | "A7"AdAG "D"FD D |] BarFly complains about two empty bars in that. It doesn't complain about the empty bar between the adjacent double bars - double bars are considered to mark boundaries within which error checking takes place, sort of (i.e. the transcriber might have good reason to break the metric regularity at a double bar) - this is an understandable policy, though personally I'd like the ability to switch it off. Why the strange beaming in that? (I can't check - my copy of the RSCDS book 12, US copyright date 1938, doesn't have that dance; you must be using a more recent edition where the contents have changed). What does your version achieve that this (with more conventional beaming, and compressed a bit) doesn't? The point of doing it like this is that you can reorganize the number of bars per line (in multiples of 2) just by adding or removing \ characters. F|"G"G3g BGB2 |"Em"BEBA "Am"GE"D7"EF|\ [1 "G"G3g BGB2 |"A7"AEAG "D" FDD :| [2 "G"GF"/F"GA "Em"GAB^c |"A7"dABG "D" FDD ||\ g|"C"e/f/g "G"dg BGB2 |"B7"BEBA "Em"GEEg | [1 "C"e/f/g "G"dg BGB2 |"A7"AEAG "D" FDD :|\ [2 "C"eg"G"dg "Am"cg"G"Bg|"A7"AdAG "D" FDD |] Some people might prefer to have initial repeat signs for each part and a barline at the start of the third staff line, but since like it or not there is a hell of a lot of ABC out there (most of it not mine) that doesn't have such features encoded, such people are far better off being provided with a switch in the typesetting software to have them inserted automatically. Did you really do that back in 1977? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
