> What the abc 'movement' needs is someone who takes > responsibility over the standard. Personally, I would > propose Jef Moine and Guido Gonzato: Jef because he's > the developer of the (TMHO) leading abc package, > Guido Gonzato because of his vision and his > dedication.
What package(s) does Guido use? At present, we have: * four mature systems representing three different sorts of software (ABCMus for playback, abcm2ps for staff notation, BarFly/Muse for both) - of these all but abcm2ps are broadly compatible; * several systems in various stages of development (Skink, PalmOS implementations, Bryan Creer's Noteworthy translator, perhaps half a dozen more) which implement most of 1.6 and whichever other ideas float the developer's boat and they manage to find time to work on; * four moribund systems which are still widely used (ABC2WIN, abcps, abcmidi, and abc2mtex). The kicker is Muse. At some point somebody else is going to revive it, and the job shouldn't be made gratuitously difficult by insisting that it should be another abcm2ps when it was designed with entirely different and very well-thought-out goals. It's a major implementation with years of work behind it and mustn't be wasted. Insisting that all of abcm2ps's features have to go in the standard makes it unimplementable for anybody whose goals include generating actual sound in some form and making every ABC construct correspond to a sonic entity. A standards commitee will have to say NO to most of those new features - da capo, say - until they are defined in such a way as to make them implementable on other platforms. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro". ------> off-list mail to "j-c" rather than "abc" at this site, please <------ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
