Guido Gonzato wrote: >On Fri, 1 Aug 2003, I. Oppenheim wrote: > >> I tested it also with: >> ...abcMus, abacus, muse, skink and barFly; >> then I gave up. > >none of which nears abcm2ps when it comes to printed output quality.
I don't think any of those programs claim to produce publication- quality printed music. Music typesetting is not the only function of abc. It's not even the most important function of abc. While abcm2ps is a magnificent program it's not very good at playing, transposing, generating midi, automatic harmonisation etc. You can't use it for editing your abc, and it's not even very good at producing fixed-resolution pictures of music for display on a website. If abcm2ps was the only abc program abc would be much less popular than it is. Under no circumstances should we allow one (functionally limited) program to dominate the development of the standard. >> Of all those, Abcm2ps was the only app >> that had no problems with the \ business >> in all it's glory, ahum... > >it's also the only applications that gives you publication-quality scores. >That's why NoteEditor uses abcm2ps as its typsetting engine. > >It's up to other packages' developers to catch up with abcm2ps. If I were >the author of such a good program, I'd refuse to lower quality for the >sake of standard compliance. Nobody's proposing a lowering of quality, as far as I can see. All of the applications are going to have to be re-written to conform with the new standard; there's no reason why abcm2ps should be an exception to this. >It's now time to tell you a story. Turbo Pascal died on the Mac, because it wasn't as good as TML Pascal, a Mac-only development system which was already available. >I'll repeat that to the end of my days: people's needs FIRST, then >standards compliance. Yes, but whose needs are we talking about? You seem to think that it's the minority of abc users who want to produce professionally printed music who should take precedence over everybody else. >It should be clear that the two of us have different goals, but I don't >think what we're doing is incompatible. Nor me. Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
