| Laura wrote:
| Also try:
| %%staffwidth 6.5in % width of staff
|
| BINGO! That did the trick. Thank you very much.
|
| Also thanks to Robert, John, Wil, Simon, and Phil for the various
| suggestions and clarifications. I intend to explore and get
| comfortable with the use of format files in the future, although
| Laura's suggestion is simpler and sufficient for my present needs.
It might be useful to use this to see if anyone is interested in a
more general discussion of the topic of such formatting directives.
One thing that has occurred to me is that there's one little thing
wrong with how abc2ps do this. It has generally be suggested that
the %%-style directives start with a keyword that identifies the sort
of program that handles the directive. In the case of abc2ps's
formatting directives, it doesn't do this. Some other programs have
used this approach, as you can see from all the abc files that have
%%MIDI directives. But the abc2ps %% formatting lines aren't labelled
as such, and are just a jumble of keywords that have no apparent
relation to each other.
It seems to me that it might be a good idea if the various clones of
abc2ps were modified so that their formatting directives start with
%%fmt, where the case is probably not significant. This would make it
obvious that 1) these are dealing with formatting, and 2) they are
related to the things that can go in .fmt files. Also, this would
eliminate the possibility of collision with someone else's %% lines.
I've been tempted to do a minor hack to my abc2ps clone so that this
syntax is accepted along with the current syntax, with the idea that
I'd start the process of hunting down all these directives and adding
the fmt chars to them. We could start a campaign to get others to
do the same, with the idea that we would eventually phase out the
older syntax.
One advantage of using %%fmt would be that it clarifies the task that
these lines are dealing with. It would probably also encourage the
authors of other software to implement the same syntax when it is
appropriate. And it might get a side discussion going on just what
sort of music-formatting directives we'd really like to have as a
subset of the standard. Standardizing these directives somewhat could
be useful to a lot of users.
This set of directives was invented my Michael Methfessel, who was
the author of the original abc2ps that's being cloned by everyone. I
think he'd agree that it was a prototype effort that could still use
some work.
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