I've been looking over Barry Say's proposal, and it seems to me
that it fits in well with the existing abc, and opens up a couple of new
possibilities. As an example, it strikes me that one could be ambitious
with the text (t:) field, and use it to construct documents which mix
staff-music and text. In particular, one could embed little staff-music
illustrations in a text document. This might be useful. (Of course
something like this would probably be impractical to implement in most
applications---which would ignore it---but in some, such as abc2mtex, it
would be a piece of cake: so easy that it would be a pity not to do it.)
The idea is this----I'll illustrate it with abc2mtex: if there is
a printable text field, then abc2mtex would simply pass it on verbatim to
TeX. TeX would then process it for printing as usual, until it hit
another field. When it hit the first X: header, abc2mtex would start
processing music. (This even works if a line starts with a backslash,
since abc2mtex would pass it on in any case.) When it reaches the next
printable text field, it returns to text mode, and so on.
Since the t: field is designed for general information, usually
unprinted, one could add a keyword, e.g. t: PRINT to indicate that the
field is to be printed. One should be able to print extracts---one or two
bars---as well as whole tunes. Extracts would have to be processed a bit
differently from tunes, so perhaps one would want to add a keyword to the
X: field: say X: EXTRACT, to indicate this. Since captions might be more
important than titles, one could have, say, T: CAPTION <text> for that.
And so on. One application would be to tune books with text
between the tunes. Another is to articles---or theses, for that
matter--on music, illustrated by short extracts, e.g. on "Dock Boggs
accompanyment of 'Oh Death'," or "Seamus Ennis' variations on the D cran,"
or "Beethoven's modulations from C# minor to D Mixolydian" (if he ever did
that.) Of course this is already possible: use an abc application to to
produce .tex or .ps files, do some hand-editing to get them in the right
form, write and format the captions, and import it all into a word
processor after converting it into whatever the word processor can handle.
But that's work. It'd be nicer to do it all in one go.
Just a possibility---after all, why shouldn't abc take over
the world?
Cheers,
John Walsh
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