Jack Campin writes: | > I've had a number of email queries about | > apparent failures that were due to "tunes" that lacked any notes. | > Sometimes this was intentional, sometimes it was because the file was | > double spaced. It would be useful to have an indication of this. | > | > The problem is how best to say this. | > There is a list of headers that could contain a code for "no notes". | > This field already uses a double quote to indicate that accompaniment | > chords are present. I wonder if there's a good single char that could | > stand for "notes", or maybe for "no notes"? Perhaps '*' (asterisk) | > could be used for this, as it doesn't seem to have any other use, and | > it is conventionally used to indicate an explanatory footnote. | | That sounds pretty good.
Maybe I'll try implementing it. | The double-spaced ones are a nightmare. Have you figured out what | sequence of events creates them? The cases I've looked at have been ABC-in-HTML, which is rarely a very good idea because of the difficulty of doing it right. I just looked at one of the new F/C files: http://www.ibiblio.org/fiddlers/AA_ABEL.htm This has several ABC tunes, but my search bot only finds one of them (Abbots Bromley). I tested the page with several browsers, and some of them displayed the other tunes as double spaced, while others showed them as single spaced. Unfortunately, lynx was one that saw them as double spaced, except for the Abbots Bromley tune. I've been thinking of filtering HTML pages through lynx as a way of getting them into a plain-text form. But this wouldn't work for this file. I've seen a couple of sites that have ABC-in-HTML with <p> at the end of each line. This is purposely double spaced, so there's probably no good fix for it. Some ABC is just too nonstandard to deal with. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
