Historical note: the first versions of abc2mtex used musciTeX---a
music macro package for TeX---which did not automatically justify lines.
You had to explicitly ask it to right-justify, and in order to make this
look right, you had to adjust the note-spacing a bit. It took some work.
Then musixTeX replaced musicTeX. It had a far superior linebreaking and
note-spacing algorithms, so the hard linebreak " * " became less useful.
They were, and are, still useful, however, to give the program a little
help, and keep it from breaking at awkward spots, so that it doesn't, for
example, break right after the pick-up notes to the next part.
One thing which should be mentioned is that hard line-breaks
are usually dependent on the font, staff size, and all sorts of
parameters which will change from program to program. Something
which is carefully formatted for abcwin, for example, might not look
very good on abc2ps.
In my own case, I have a slight stake in this since I put some
files of session tunes on the net in `94. These are still used quite
a bit. They use " * " for a hard line break and sometimes ** to signal
the final staff. These were all optimized for musicTeX, and I would
hope that any other program printing them out would simply ignore
them gracefully---they'll probably look better if formatted with the
program's own algorithm than with the (now inappropriate) line-breaks
I inserted.
For this reason, I am not at all convinced that abc2win has
committed abc in any way to " ! " as a hard linebreak. Those breaks were
mostly inserted by the program, not the writer, and fit abcwin's format,
but not necessarily anyone else's. And I'll bet that a good percentage
of those who use them knowingly now are on this list and can speak to the
issue themselves.
Cheers,
John Walsh
Bernard Hill writes:
> >But * is already part of the standard as a right-justified linebreak and
> >I've seen plenty of tunes that use it.
>
> Is *that* what it means!
>
> But what is a right-justified linebreak? Or more to the point, what's a
> NON-right justified line break?
>
> When printing music I would expect the music to look like
>
>
> ============================
> ============================
> ============================
> ===========
>
> with only the last line maybe not being right-justified.
>
> Does non-right justify mean the score could be
>
> =====================
> ==========================
> ========================
> ===========
>
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