John Chambers wrote: >John Walsh writes: >| ... And as a corollary, I hope that people writing playback >| programs make it possible to reassign the letters H-Z, or at least disable >| the defaults. I know Abcmus does. It's a real drag to hear emphasis >| interpreted as an inverted mordent with no way of changing it. > >Maybe as a reminder we should see if there's yet a >concensus on just what the syntax is for defining such >things. I've tried to follow a few of the discussions, but >I'm pretty sure that I misunderstand most of what most of >the people say. I've been considering implementing some of >the ideas for some time, but since the discussions have >generally degenerated to the point that I don't grok them >at all, I'm pretty sure that I would just implement >something entirely different that what others think is the >perfect solution to all the world's ornamentation problems. > >At the very least, we need to way to tell novices "If you >want to use the letter 'Q' to represent the 'foo' ornament, >here's what you type ...." > >Is there a consistent way of saying this that a lot of abc >tools now use? Or are they all inconsistent with each >other? Can we get a list of syntaxes that different tools >now implement?
At risk of opening that can of worms again, this is what BarFly does: You can define the meaning of any of the symbols [H..Z] by means of the U: field, like this: U: S = segno Note that there are no exclamation marks bracketing the word "segno", and no need for them. You can place such definitions in any of three places: (1) in the tune header, where it applies to that tune only. (2) in the file header (applies to all tunes in that file). (3) in an external file (where it's a global setting). Local definitions take precedence over global definitions. You can define multiple letters to represent the same symbol, e.g. U: T = trill U: U = trill In this case both letters will produce a trill symbol in the staff notation, but you can define separate macros to make them play differently. You can also explicitly define a letter to have no meaning, so it is ignored in the staff notation: U: I = none This is useful when working with abc produced by another program which supports symbols which BarFly doesn't know how to draw. This mechanism has been in place for a long time, and predates the "draft" abc 1.7 stuff by several years. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
