Richard Robinson writes: | On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 06:05:48PM -0400, Ewan A. Macpherson wrote: | > | > What I'm getting at is that I don't think an abc typesetting program | > should be making "corrections" like this. There is a fairly direct | > correspondance between the notational symbols in the abc file and what | > shows up on the rendered page. If a user *wants* a double bar they can | > write it in the abc file, and if they want something else they can | > specify that, and the typesetter should typeset it as specified. | | This seems to make sense. Well, to me, anyway ... couldn't these symbols | just be treated literally. ie print dots where you see a ":", a normal | barline where you see "|" and a thick bar line where you see "]", in any | combination ? Would this cause any issues. maybe for player programs, if | people started writing free-form combinations of these ?
This strikes me as a very useful approach. The original abc2ps did a bit of reduction of complex bar lines, but one of its "features" was that it mostly just drew the symbols that correspond to what's in the abc, even if it's "wrong". I've always considered this an advantage. As an implementer, I've very well aware that my knowledge of music notation is somewhat limited, and others might want or need something that's beyond what I've seen. And I was impressed by the fact that it casually accepted things like M:21/16 and measures with inconsistent total lengths, things that a lot of musicians would consider "wrong". Since it didn't complain, but just drew the music, it could handle music that other software couldn't. The more literal a music formatter can be, the more powerful it is for its users. One sort of suggestion I've always liked is that the double bar lines be drawn a lot more literally. We do sometimes see abc that ends with things like :|| and :|] rather than the :| that the 1.6 standard mentions. I think it would be an improvement if software would draw these quite literally, with two thin lines for :|| and a thin-thick ending for :|]. Something I did with my jcabc2ps clone was to make it draw sequences like |]| and |][| literally. This makes it possible to produce highly visible phrase boundaries. Such things may not have much musical meaning, but they are really useful if you are dealing with musicians trying to read the music. The :: symbol is somewhat of a special case, since it really is a sort of abbreviation. A bare : is also an interesting case. I've seen a lot of music that uses this, usually with four dots between the staff lines, for several purposes. Some older books use just this at the start of a staff as a begin-repeat indicator. (O'Neill and CRE both do this.) The same symbol is used as a "weak" bar line with no repeat meaning, to split up long bars and make them more readable. You see this in some editions of Renaissance and Baroque music, where the original had very long bars, and the editor wanted to split each bar into two or more. Such weak bar lines are used to indicate bar lines that weren't in the original. Again, it has little musical meaning, but adds to readability. We've had the suggestion of .| for this usage, which is probably a better idea. But just a bare : would match conventional usage closely (including the ambiguity of whether it has something to do with repeating something ;-). To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
