Don Whitener writes: | In my view of things, removing the C:Composer field steps just over the | line in being too radical :0( I really like to see this header just under | the title, where it doesn't get lost.
This does remind me of something that has long been lacking from abc: We need a standard way of distinctly labelling lyricists. Published music has at least two "standard" ways of doing this, and people use all sorts of ad-hoc ways of telling you who wrote the music and words. Or they just say "by" and don't make a distinction, leading you to believe that they own the copyright on what is actually a traditional tune, when they only wrote new lyrics. It would be very useful if ABC had an explicit way of naming the lyricist that could be easily spotted by software. As an example, in my collection I have a file VaiennutViulu.abc that contains a beautiful Finnish air, with the header lines X: 1 T: Vaiennut Viulu C: s\"avelm\"a: Konsta Jylh\"a C: sanat: Viljami Niittykoski ... I did this basically because it mimicked what was on the page that I transcribed it from. To me those C lines are perfectly obvious, but I can understand why some people just might not find them very comprehensible. But I don't know a better way to do it. I could put two of the words into English, but it's not obvious to me that that's much of an improvement. (Why English, and not Spanish or Mandarin? And as a programmer, I really hate trying to write code to parse data that's in English. I don't care if it IS my native language; it's not something I'd wish on my worst enemy. ;-) If there were an abc standard for this, I'd be happy to change all my files that contain such C: lines. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
