Bernard Hill writes: | In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, I. Oppenheim <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes | >On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Bernard Hill wrote: | > | >> >> 5. No mention of midline | >> >What do you mean? | >> | >> Sorry, I abandoned a comment and forgot to complete | >> it. I am thinking of the midline field in Clefs. | > | >I'm not sure what you mean. | > | >[K: clef=bass] or [K: bass] is legal. | | Is it? I couldn't find it. | | Anyway the midline field attempted to define the middle line of say the | bass clef as D or "D," to avoid too many leger lines. I never liked it | anyway so glad it's gone.
Well, I'm not! It's a simple, elegant solution to a problem we've had from the start: Different people insist on different abc notation for notes on an alto and bass staff. Some think that the unmarked abc letter notes should always map to the staff; others think that abc notes should have an absolute pitch and the bass staff should be written with lots and lots of commas. Discussions in the past have shown that there will be no compromise here. And there are reasonable arguments for both, as well as for other mappings. But there is a very simple solution: "middle=d" or "middle=D," tells the reader (human or software) which mapping the writer thought was the one that God intended us to use. And it is often abbreviated to "m=d" or "m=D,", so programs should be prepared to accept those. (I wonder if God's true name is "Chris"? If you look at the actual meaning of the Greek phrase that the name derives from, this does make a lot of sense. ;-) There was also another good suggestion that "clef=bass,," be used for a bass line notated two octaves low. I liked this, too, and I made my jcabc2ps clone accept both of them. This is more compact, but it has the limitation that it doesn't allow things like K: G clef=treble middle=d This is, of course, French Violin clef, beloved by Baroque fiddlers world wide. There are a couple of other conventional uses of clefs that are positioned on other lines than the usual, and this notation can express them, too. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
