Irwin Oppenheim opines: | On Tue, 24 Jun 2003, Georg Hajdu wrote: | > > In abc the capital letters H..Z are reserved for | > > user-defined purposes. Software which supported | > > microtonal accidentals could make use of these. | | That is not a good idea. Several of these letters | (THLMPSO?) have already a predefined meaning. It would | be better to leave these letters free.
Not sure I'd agree with that. I'd say that those letters have a predefined *default* meaning in some abc software. But not all existing abc programs agree on which letter means which ornament. And it would be much more useful if we could persuade all software developers to make them definable. Part of the problem is that first versions of software will naturally not do much with such things. And a lot of software will never get past this stage. So it's likely that we'll always have software that uses only some default meaning of a letter. But we have this problem right now, and since different programs give different hard-coded meaning to some letters, there's not much we can do about it other than encourage the programmers to add a bit more code to their programs. Another part of the problem is that when we've discussed the issue in the past, it has often led to flaming outbursts from people debating their idiosyncratic definition of the term "macro", usually in terms that make absolutely no sense to the other participants. It's obvious that some people thing the others are idiots, but can't seem to explain what they're talking about in terms that the other programmers understand. This does not bode well for any general guidelines on how to handle this topic in a fashion that's useful to non-programmer musicians. I've tried on a couple occasions to do something with this in my abc2ps clone, but I've generally bogged down in the fact that I simply don't understand what most of the people are trying to say (other than that I'm an idiot ;-). Maybe some day we'll have suggestions that make sense to idiots like me, but it hasn't happened yet. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
