Re: [abcusers] Some things never go away ...

[Richard Robinson]

On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, Frank Nordberg wrote:
> Richard Robinson wrote:
> >
> > Lists have been posted here, once or twice,
> ...
> 
> Don't be modest, Richard. *You* have posted a very useful list here at
> the list a couple of times. I've taken the liberty to include it in the
> abcyclopedia at:
> http://www.musicaviva.com/abc/abcyclopedia/view.tpl?kw=Special%20characters
> 
> ...
> >
> > but I'd have thought the best way would
> > be for one of the authors to include a little file listing what their
> > conversion routine knows about ?
> 
> Yep. The list is good, but not that useful as long as the application
> don't support them all - and even worse - there's no way of knowing
> which Tex charcters any given abc application supports.

Yes, that's the trouble. Part of it, anyway. Ideal would be a big list of
all the funnies that TeX can print (is there any end to them, I wonder ?)
and universal ABC support for all of them ...


-- 
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem


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Re: [abcusers] Some things never go away ...

[Frank Nordberg]

Richard Robinson wrote:
> 
> Character sets.

[snip]

>
> Lists have
> been posted here, once or twice,
...

Don't be modest, Richard. *You* have posted a very useful list here at
the list a couple of times. I've taken the liberty to include it in the
abcyclopedia at:
http://www.musicaviva.com/abc/abcyclopedia/view.tpl?kw=Special%20characters

...
>
> but I'd have thought the best way would
> be for one of the authors to include a little file listing what their
> conversion routine knows about ?

Yep. The list is good, but not that useful as long as the application
don't support them all - and even worse - there's no way of knowing
which Tex charcters any given abc application supports.


Frank Nordberg


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[abcusers] Some things never go away ...

[Richard Robinson]

Character sets.

Whinge, moan.


I've heard from somebody who knows about one of the Macedonian tunes in my
web collection. She gives me a title for it, which includes a character
that's new to me - a c with an inverted "hat" accent. I've seen these
printed before, but somehow never needed to print one myself.

This is not part of iso_8859-1 (my local character set), so the "ignore
the issue, stick the 8-bit number in and forget about machines with other
charsets" cheat doesn't work and it has to be done in the proper way,
using the TeX encodings. Which I like to do anyway, because it _should_
behave properly on the rest of the world's machines as well as my own. 
But, in this case, is unlikely to. 

An hour or so of graunching around eventually turned up a dvi file in the
depths of the LaTeX documentation which shows a series of "check" accents; 
and "\check{c}" does indeed produce what I'm looking for, in TeX, and in
abc2mtex (once I've discovered it needs surrounding by the "$" math
symbols, anyway. Like I said, "whinge, moan"). So I'm happy, job done. 
Hardly anybody else will be, though; the abc2ps family unanimously produce
a title that reads "Makedonsko devoj$\check{c}$e" exactly as given, which
is neither pretty nor right.

One of the little things that keeps abc being more useful for western
european tunes than for the rest of the world (it also seems that html
doesn't have an encoding for this character, ho hum). 

In the course of discovering this, I've also noticed that there doesn't
seem to be any coherent listing of exactly which TeX encodings the abc2ps
converters will understand, which I'd have thought would be helpful for
people who don't use TeX, or have it on their machine to rtfms. Lists have
been posted here, once or twice, but I'd have thought the best way would
be for one of the authors to include a little file listing what their
conversion routine knows about ?

-- 
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem


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