> I  wonder  whether  we  should  keep  discussing  this   on
> abcusers,  or  do  it in private?  A public discussion does
> have the advantage of keeping others up  to  date  on  what
> we've  done, and it invites their comments.  I can think of
> several cases where we might want to bring in the  question
> of  what's  the  best way to do something, with the idea of
> putting it into the standard.

I for one wouldn't mind if you kept the discussion on the list. I'd be
quit interested in seeing the 2 abc2ps descendants converge, if only to
save me from having to find out which one I like better ;) 

I have noticed that both of you have dropped the original abc2ps's
transpose function. I guess there's a good reason for that, but I found it
quite convenient.

> One command-line change that I  made,  which  others  might
> find  useful:   I changed the input/output so that jcabc2ps
> acts like a conventional unix "filter".  If  there  are  no
> input  files,  it reads from stdin.  If there are no output
> options, rather  than  writing  to  Out.ps,  it  writes  to
> stdout.  This way, I can use preprocessors (like abcpp) and
> postprocessors (various perl programs  I  have  that  munge
> postscript),  without  the  mess  of  creating intermediate
> files and then trying to make sure that they're cleaned up.
> 
> I found that this really simplified the cleanup job for  my
> tune  finder's  conversions.   If you don't need to produce
> intermediate files, you don't have much cleanup.
>
> I have the impression that, at  least  on  unixoid  systems
> (which  now  includes  Macs),  lots of others have uses for
> pre- and post-processors, so many  users  would  find  this
> useful.

Being able to use stdin and stdout is nice, yes. At least for stdin, I
would have thought however that just givin a filename of '-' would have
sufficed to achieve that. Actually, I don't know whether this is a feature
of bash, Linux or Unix variants in general, but I guess every environment
in which reading from stdin makes sense would provide a similar means!?

I've also noticed that with the current version, jcabc2ps ignores
the output options and wrtites to stdout in all cases. Is this intended, a
bug, or am I doing something wrong? I found especially '-o =' quite useful
at times.

> I suppose you might want  another  option  to  suppress  ps
> output if you don't like the -/+ convention that I adopted.
> Or you could use the  backwards  approach  that  a  lot  of
> people  seem  to  like,  with  -o meaning produce ps and +o
> meaning don't produce ps output.  This strikes me as a  bit
> perverse, but it's common enough these days.

Actually I wouldn' mind either way, but it would be nice if both programs,
while they still exist separately, behaved in the same way in that
respect.

Greetings,

  Manuel

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