On Jan 21, 2004, at 12:49 PM, John Chambers wrote:
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.
Yeah, my music knowledge is really very specific...I
do seem to recall that the synthetic music people use some other symbols...
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.
Yes, I considered doing that, but took the shortest path in my rush to see a printed page. :-)
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 agree the macro would be nice. But I think for most middle eastern music you wouldn't tend to write too many half-flat/sharp accidentals in the body -- you would tend to put them in the key signature. Hm... I guess if you wanted good MIDI rendering of modulations you might do that though... and the electronic music goobs would like it...
-Jas
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