I've held back from this discussion so far to see where it was going but I think it's time to add my 2p.
Over the past year or so, this group has become dominated by discussion of abcm2ps; it shows a strong tendency to become the abcm2ps users group. Now abcm2ps is an excellent program, but it is extremely limited; all it does is convert abc to postscript. If that's all you want to do with abc you will be perfectly happy to see the abc standard redefined in terms of what abcm2ps does. The language is, however much more than source code for musical typesetting. It is an abstract method of representing music in a human-readable format, and its development must not be tied to one particular use, any more than it should be tied to one particular musical genre. So, if we are going to hand over the development of the standard to one person, that person is going to need to have a wide range of musical interests, and be very familiar with the existing corpus of abc and the ways in which it is used. He is going to be equally familiar with all three of the major platforms on which abc software is run, and with the major abc programs which run on those platforms. He is going to be familiar with programs which do fast onscreen display of abc music, programs which play abc, programs which do musical analysis or use abc for archival or database purposes etc. He's also going to have lots and lots of time available. I don't think such a person exists. It's a job for a committee. Perhaps a different approach is called for. A while back, I made a study of the way in which different programs handle multivoice abc. <http://www.barfly.dial.pipex.com/multivoice.txt> It was a lot of work to do, but it proved useful, and since I put that document online, the major abc programs have actually moved closer together. Maybe what we need to do is to publicly document the remaining differences between programs in such a way that all of the developers can see what's already been done, and a) avoid reinventing the wheel.* b) support multiple existing formats where they exist. Certainly, whatever way we take forward, the first step is to document the existing programs in a comparative way. The way in which your favourite program does it is not necessarily the best way, and until you have done the comparison you really don't know. Phil Taylor * actually I'm not averse to doing that myself, since if nobody had ever reinvented the wheel your car would still run on log rollers. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
