Stephen Kellett comments: | In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Phil Taylor | <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes | >>a) Symbols can be on notes, rests and bar lines | > | >Bad Idea. This breaks all existing programs which support aligned words, | >and any existing files which include aligned words and rests. | | Forgive my ignorance, why is this a bad idea? Have I misunderstood the | spec? I'm writing my parser/player/display program. I've already | implemented the above and it was not hard to achieve (I can make the | symbols attach to anything in the markup, pretty much).
I did a quick check through the couple hundred tunes with lyrics in my collection, to find cases where matching lyrics with rests would break the alignment. I couldn't find any. I think the reason is that, as is done in most "fake-book" style songbooks, my files rarely contain any rests within a phrase. There are rests at the ends of phrases, but I generally use bar lines there to handle the usual problem of tied notes etc. So the next phrase's first word is forced to be after a bar line, and any ties and rests before the bar line are skipped. I'd guess that this is fairly common. It's likely that some abc tools that handle w: lines now do align syllables with rests, but nobody has ever noticed. If this is true, then making this the official behavior would hardly break anything. And those songs would already be semi-broken, because there hasn't been an official standard for this and different tools probably do handle it differently right now. -- O <:#/> John Chambers + <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> / \ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
