> The standard can be set to say that !...! is a special symbol, and > developers can programs to read files on that basis UNLESS the > header contains "abc2win" in which case it is a line break! > Someone tell me that life really could be that simple!
It isn't. I really want mid-line ! linebreaks (they're far more important to me than anything I could achieve with !...! constructs) and I have been lobbying Phil for years to add them to BarFly, which doesn't put any creator info in its headers by default. This isn't a matter of supporting legacy tunes, it's about doing something mostly new (insofar as abc2win users don't seem to have yet exploited this possibility in their program the way I want to use it) AND IT CANNOT BE ACHIEVED BY ANY OTHER MEANS. Let's hope there are a lot more programs that can use them in future. Perhaps it might make it clearer why I'm being so insistent about this if I explain what most of my time using ABC is spent doing. I spend about a full day a week in the National Library of Scotland researching things, mostly tunes, which are copied in ABC using a geriatric Mac laptop that runs BarFly and pair of cheap walkman headphones. For the time I'm transcribing tunes, I'm working with rare sources that I can't afford to have photocopied; the process required by the library for old and delicate material involves intermediate microfilm, and usually leads to a fairly bad result anyway, where things like articulation marks often get lost. (The NLS's charges, which are among the lowest in Scotland for rare materials, are still high enough that if I wanted everything I transcribed to be on xerox first, I could easily incur a photocopy bill for a day's direct transcribing that was more than I paid for my laptop). So I've got no alternative but to get the most accurate transcription possible on the spot. The way BarFly works gives me a three-way check on accuracy: - does the structure make sense? - does it sound right? - does the score on the screen look exactly like what's on the page of the original in front of me? The first is dealt with by the columnar layout I use; I'm mostly doing things in four- and eight-bar phrases, and if something can't be laid out to look like that in ABC source form, chances are that something's gone wrong somewhere, either 250 years ago or in the previous five minutes. (BarFly also has error checking utilities which on average picks up one miskeying every eight bars; I'd find these manually anyway, but BarFly finds them quicker). The second is handled by BarFly's playback (helped by the ability to highlight the note being played - this means you can move instantly from a general feeling of "something's not quite right in that phrase" to "typo on that note"). The third is supported by BarFly's instant preview (no batch processing or invoking of GhostScript involved - GhostScript would be unusably big and slow on that laptop anyway). In this situation I don't have time to process the layout optimized to show the structure of the tune into some other form before showing it on the screen - and since I need to identify where any errors are in my source, what's on the screen has to be directly derived from it. So I *cannot* afford to have unnecessary built-in conflicts between source readability and screen readability. If I want a print-optimized version by adding graphical tweaks, I'll do it at home; the laptop is a lousy machine to use for them anyway. What it is *very* good for is interactivity, and it's the speed of switching between "structure", "sound", and "score" modes of perception that makes for accuracy. But supporting this is a rather fragile characteristic of a language, which many syntactic misfeatures could break, and people who haven't used it in such an interactive environment won't easily spot the important issues. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
