Richard Robinson writes: | > | > A parser should be able to know that a word at the beginning of a line | > delimited with ":" is | > a keyword. | | Of course, It's already possible to do this, using the "%%" trick (convention). | I've been forced to use this for %%Copyright, which is a thing that's | important to keep track of, which ordinary ABC can't handle.
This is also done routinely by a lot of people by putting the copyright information in either a C or N header. Thus, I have a copy of My Cape Breton Home with the line: C: Jerry Holland \251 1988 Jerry has put all his tunes online in abc, and he generally does the copyright this way. There is a minor problem with the lack of a standard place to put this information, and it would be nice to standardize that. But copyright law doesn't have such a requirement, just that you put the notice in a prominent place. Publications do put copyright information all over the place. And there is even a reasonable argument against standardizing it in one place. As the above line illustrates, when the composer holds the copyright, it's obvious that the best place is in the C header line. If the copyright is held by someone else, then it's just as obvious that the C line should not contain the copyright notice. The %%Copyright approach isn't currently as good, because most abc software won't do things like include it in PS or MIDI output. But if we make it the standard, lots of programs will probably be changed to recognize it and use it. We have had occasional suggestions that abc allow spelling out the names of header lines, using Title: and Composer: for example. This would mean some small tweaks to abc parsers, but it obvious wouldn't be a really big deal. Of course, considering how many abc users can't even be bothered with typing spaces, I'd predict that the 1-char headers would remain the overwhelming majority. You see this in library and bibliography info, where Title: and Author: are proper labels, but T: and A: are probably a lot more common because the software nearly always allows it. And it saves disk space. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
