Three thoughts:
1) The parsing is quick, efficient, and apparently accurate. If Phil is actually working on this perhaps the code would help him.
2) Does John, or anyone else, have the index.fmt that might do what I want?
3) Is there any consideration to adding an "incipit format" specification to ABC 2.0? Seems to me it would be most useful..
Chuck Boody ======== On Thursday, August 26, 2004, at 05:41 AM, John Walsh wrote:
For abc2mtex, you need a file index.fmt in the directory you want to index. Put " T<40 |<30 " in the file index.fmt. To index file.abc, type
>abc2mtex -i file >sort_in
at the command line. Then the list you want should be in the text file "index" in the same directory, sorted by tune title, with the first two or so measures given in abc. There are lots of other ways to do this---see the file index.tex in the abc2mtex distribution for the definitive explanation. of the whole indexing facility.
It's true as Phil says that abc2mex can be a real pain to set up, since you also need TeX, which itself is non-trivial to set up. However, that doesn't enter here. The sorting part of abc2mtex works without having tex installed---it just writes a text file, and you take it from there. So all you have to do is to compile or download abc2mtex and sort_in.
It seems a bit baroque to only use abc2mtex for indexing, but on the other hand, I've often found this indexing facility useful. Moreover, since the code is freely available, it might give an idea of how to add this type of sorting facility to other programs.
Cheers, John
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
