Manuel Reiter writes: | > Go to | > http://www.musicaviva.com/abc/abcyclopedia/view.tpl?kw=Special%20characters | | Great, thanks, that's exactly what I was looking for. | | Unfortunately, the hacek and breve accents did not seem to work with my | versions of either abc2ps or jcabc2ps when I tried them yesterday | (guessing, then), they were just rendered as 'u' or 'v' preceding the | would-be-accented letter. I'll have to check versions when I'm back home, | but if anybody knows off the top of their head which abc2ps clones can | handle these, I'd be grateful for the hint.
You're right. I've been wanting this from the beginning, and I've even used notation like \^s and \^c in a few tunes with the hope that I would eventually learn how to implement it in my abc2ps clone. It's been a few years, and I still have no clue whatsoever. On my home printer (HP LaserJet 4L), I once saw it produce a Polish slash-l character, which is a hint of a possibility. But I couldn't reproduce it. The manual doesn't help me. The original abc2ps, and probably all clones, will accept just about any 8-bit bytes and pass them on to a printer. But they're just 8-bit bytes, and what comes out is what the printer decides they should look like. I don't know whether PostScript (or PDF) even has a way to doing anything different. PS just contains text as a string of bytes. What they look like is determined by what you feed the file to, and what fonts it has installed. I don't know if there's any way for a program on the computer to know how to make a specific 8-bit byte come out on paper as a particular glyph. The problem here is that abc2ps just produces PostScript. It can't possibly know what you're going to do with that. It can't query the printer to see what fonts are installed, because it can't know what printer you are going to use, if any. Consider, for example, my Tune Finder, which can return PS files. Presumably you are going to print them, or maybe feed them to a PS display program. How would a CGI script on my server query your printer or PostScript renderer for its list of installed fonts? This is a rhetorical question, of course. You'd better hope that my script can't query the hardware on your machine. In fact, it probably can't connect to your machine at all. If you're behind any sort of firewall, this would be blocked, is as it should be. And even if it could get in, it still has no way of knowing what you'll do with a PS file, so it doesn't know what to query for a font list. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
