Richard Robinson wrote: >But, one little thought occurred to me, re the much-discussed and >little-agreed "!" staff-break. With no prejudice as to whether this ought >to exist, etc etc (except that, the more I think about it, the more I'd >like it, so, if it helps ...) it needn't conflict with the !decoration! >notation at all. Generalising from all the given examples of this, they >don't any of them contain any whitespace. Even if they did, maybe it >would be acceptable to say that such ornament-names may not begin with >whitespace, ie that there should be no whitespace between the opening >"!" and the first symbol of the ornament-name ? >And I can't think of any way in which whitespace following a "!" >staff-break could have any implications for the music (?? go on, >someone ...), so I think these 2 constructions could be mixed, on the >same line of text, without any ambiguity, by including spaces after >staff-breaks if necessary. It would be a slight restriction on >flexibility of abc layout, but that's the worst (only) catch I can >think of, and it would get round the conflict.
That would be a solution, were it not for the fact that there are already lots of files which use the ! for a line break, and quite a few of them have mid-line linebreaks with no whitespace following. Furthermore there are still lots of people using abc2win, most of whom don't read this group, and who are going to go on producing new files which do not conform to this suggestion. (Why should they bother since their program does not support !...! anyway, so they don't need to make a distinction.) The only solution I can see to this is to introduce a different character as delimiter in !...!. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
