| Jeff Senn wrote: | > | > I'm a newcomer here. Has the issue of non-12 tone music come up here | > before? ... | > I recently snagged a copy of John Chambers's jcabc2ps so I could print | > some | > tunes and modified it for my purposes. The 'quick hack' I used was to | > use "^/" and "_/" to represent half-sharps and flats -- thinking that | > later | > a real fraction can be used to do more-than-24 tone music. e.g. "^3/48"
Hi, Jeff. I just checked the jcabc2ps with your hacks into the sourceforge CVS repository. I added a few simple test files in the jcabc2ps/abc directory to exercise these accidentals, and it all seems to work fine. I also googled around a bit for the notation that people use for quarter-tone accidentals. I did find a number of other symbols. The symbols now in jcabc2ps do seem to be the most common, according to google, but that doesn't mean much. I have wondered about another hack to allow for reading in a PS routine for an accidental. The PS routines are really just boilerplate, hard-coded into the C (syms.c) now. It doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to add a table of the modifiable symbols, document their names, and add an option to read them in from a file. This would let people use different forms of at least some symbols. The definition would probably need to include the height and width of an ornament, so the code would know how much space to give it. But I haven't tried it yet. It does seem like it would mean a bit of surgery on the output routines. Pieter writes: | I was considering exactly the same: Just hack the half-sharps and half-flats | in there. At the moment I'm trying to compile LilyPond, which has all the | microtonal stuff already in there..... but.... I'm glad all the ABC-programs | are so easy to compile :-)... | | Think I like your syntax: using a forward slash to divide the sharps and flats. This does seem like a possibly desirable use of the substitution-type "macro". I've seen microtone notation that uses an assortment of symbols. If we allowed notation like ^3/24, people might not always want to type all that. If you could define, say, P to be ^3/24, then you could use P for that sharp. But I'm not sure if current macro expanders will allow for redefining accidentals this way. I'd thought I understood how the term "macro" was used in the computing biz. But past discussions of the term here have rapidly left me totally baffled. So I haven't tried to implement anything. I know that the term is used in some recent (Microsoft?) software in some sense that's quite other than how programmers use it, and that might be the source of the confusion. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
