Jack Campin comments: | | Macs don't use ISO-8859 as their native character set and don't claim | to, so it doesn't matter what the standard says; there is nothing in | the ABC spec that gives 8859 any special status, so it's irrelevant. | (I think the Mac character set is older). The copyright sign in most | Mac fonts is hex A9, decimal 169. | | The next generation of Macs will use Unicode, which I do not understand | in the least and don't intend to until I have to.
Probably a practical attitude. And if the Unicode partisans are at all accurate, users generally shouldn't have to worry about it. It's a big headache for programmers, though, since they'll have to learn to deal with unicode text. And it's not as straightforward as people would have you believe, especially since it's yet another case of "The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from." Unicode is this family of character sets ... | abc2ps presumably runs on EBCDIC machines too. What does \251 give you | on those? No idea. But there will probably never be any more of those, and I don't expect I'll have to deal with them in any musical context. Can you imagine trying to do something with computerized music on a mainframe? (Shudder...) | > (And what I'd be tempted to do is implement the html symbols for such | > things, as one small step towards MusicXML.) | | That sounds like a better idea, but still, if you want to make sure | the copyright info is included in the comment fields of a generated | sound file, how could you arrange it without having a special header | field? It's a nasty heuristic problem to figure out what might be | meant by a text field with an "©" somewhere in the middle of it, | where's the terminator? There's always the word "Copyright", which despite being English has legal import pretty much everywhere. It's a few more bytes, but still usable. One problem with the %%copyright or other special header lines is that it leads to the same problem that you see with a lot of published music. It tells you that some sort of copyright claim is being made, but it doesn't tell you what. For example, there are all those copyright notices on the bottom of pages of 200-year-old music that obviously can't be copyrighted under any laws. What is meant, of course, is that the specific hard-copy edition is covered by copyright, although the music itself may not be. But many publishers don't like to tell you this; they want you to pay for "copies" even if you aren't really making a copy. So they make such a vague claim that you don't know what is covered, hoping that they can sucker a lot of people into paying for the right to use music that is actually public domain. This is the main advantage of that little circle-c in a C or Z line. In the C line, it says that the composition itself is copyright by the composer; in the Z line, it says that the transcription (but not the music) is copyright by the transcriber. A copyright symbol on a B or D line similarly tells you who owns rights to the book or recording, although they may not own the tune itself. A good copyright notice will tell the reader what the copyright covers, preferably with minimum verbiage. This is probably why some people like to use \251. It's only 4 chars, and can be put into the text in a way that says what copyright claim is being made. But it is making an assumption of an ISO-standard character set, and there are still computer systems that don't use those. There's no good solution to this, other than pressing for standards. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
