Jack Campin comments: | X:0 | T:Dalnahassaig | Z:Jack Campin <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> version 1.0 September 2001 | C:Pipe Major George S. McLennan | S:Gordon Highlanders Pipe Music Collection volume I | B:NLS Mus.D.s.19 | R:Strathspey | M:C | K:Hp | % No tune body - index entry | | which, under John's proposal, would get an entry "TZCSBRMK*" in the | Tune Finder. | | If John's software can identify bodiless tunes without any special | signalling, maybe no ABC notation is needed for it; but it still | seems to me that it would be a good idea to signal which tunes are | *meant* to be that way, to distinguish bibliographies or works in | progress from the results of communication/conversion foulups. A | single barline, as Phil suggests, is something that couldn't easily | comprise a complete tune body by accident, so it could be used for | such a convention if everybody agreed on it.
I'd agree, except that I don't think the single bar line idea is the best. The reason is that it's already useful for a different purpose. I've used this to get abc2ps to output a blank staff or three. Thus, I could write the above tune as: X:0 T:Dalnahassaig Z:Jack Campin <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> version 1.0 September 2001 C:Pipe Major George S. McLennan S:Gordon Highlanders Pipe Music Collection volume I B:NLS Mus.D.s.19 R:Strathspey M:C K:Hp | | | | This would give me a printout that has four blank staves. The original abc2ps has a minor bug that makes the last one slightly short, but that doesn't matter for my purpose. The purpose is to produce a sheet of paper that I can write on. I also use this same trick occasionally to add blank staves to a tune. Sometimes I make every other staff blank, sometimes I put them all at the bottom. I'd suggest that the above "% No tune body - index entry" line is a better model for this sort of info. But I'd make it "%% No tune", a fixed string that software could look for. The rest of the line would be treated as comment, of course, so you could include an explanation as in this example. I have one tune that has no notes, but has an N: header line explaining that the copyright holder told me I didn't have permission to put it online. If we agree on the "%% No Tune" idea, I could easily add the line: %% No tune - copyright holder denied permission. I'd be tempted to have the Tune Finder recognize this and append it (in parens) to the title. It'd be easy enough to do. But I'd still predict that only a few conscientious users (like Jack ;-) would ever use it. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
