On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, John Chambers wrote: > Tom Novelli writes: > | I think I'd better rethink my proposal, since (as expected) it's been > | soundly rejected by several folk-tune collectors whose support is needed. > | I have ideas for a better format (IMHO) for transcribing tunes; besides > | correcting some "mistakes" in ABC and borrowing a few things from NMD, it > | would look more like a programming language... but I can convert it to ABC > | for public consumption. > > Well, I for one would like to publicy encourage this. ABC is a fairly > good notation, for what it is. But there are things that probably > can't be done with it, without losing its primary role as a notation > that's typable and readable by humans. > > Of course, if you're going to do this, you might want to take a good > look at LilyPond first. You may decide that they've already done much > of what you want. The practical approach may be to join that crowd.
Hmm.. with western Mass. phone lines (good for 28.8 or so) it'd take me weeks to download lilypond, X, TeX, and libraries. Not worth the trouble. Besides, I can see why someone would prefer ABC -- especially for folk music. > Or maybe we do want an intermediate notation that keeps as much of > ABC's accessibility without worrying overly much about being very > compatible. There is a lot of possibility here. This should be done > in a separate discussion, however, maybe with a new mailing list. And > check this list occasionally, so you can keep notifying people of the > new effort. It may take some of the pressure off ABC to be all things > to all musicians. That's a thought.. and with the pressure off ABC, we could rethink it a little, with compatibility in mind. Actually, the big ABC collections usually don't abuse ABC, but the format lends itself to abuse. Maybe what we need is a "Guide to Writing Compatible ABC" to define "good ABC" as a subset of what's permitted by all the various draft standards... sort of like the HTML "Any browser" campaign. I'm gonna sign off the mailing list for now.. it's too damn busy to keep up with :) I'll make it known when my ABC viewer is ready for the world. You could adapt it for your Tunefinder, so it just spits out a PBM without all the CPU time and pixel aliasing problems involved with Ghostscript... To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
