On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 11:31:54PM +0000, John Chambers wrote: > Richard Robinson writes: > | > | 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.
Yes, that was why I felt I needed a particular place to put just that info, and know that that was what it was. I had cases where the maker was the copyright holder, cases where the 2 were different, and a lot of Swedish/Norwegian "efter"s, which also seemed to want to be in C: - and I didn't really want "efter Pers Hans Olsson" displayed in the same way as "Copyright XYZ Music Inc." > 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. That's true, that other programs won't deal with it. But, my knowing what it is is enables me to get it displayed appropriately on my gifs, which I think are seen by more people than are using the ABC (and on paper locally). Though it would be preferrable if people using my ABC through their software saw it too ... I do think it would be useful if we could agree on a field for this. Call it my attempt at a de-facto :) > 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. And typing time. And (getting really pernickety) the alignment helps legibility. But I think we're going to have to deal with this at some point. We _are_ running out of characters, there are ambiguities which could be clarified by using a whole word, it would make the whole thing rather more accessible to less-techy readers. There's alway pre-processing, of course. "#define %%Title: T:" ... -- Richard Robinson "The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
