Frank Nordberg wrote:
>Jack Campin wrote:
>...
>> BTW, one thing BarFly doesn't with Gregorian chant could be added quite
>> easily: drawing the staff in red (or with one of the staff lines in red,
>> I forget which one got this treatment). In some manuscripts I've seen
>> it makes the notation much more readable.
>
>According to Guido's notation system the c line was drawn in yellow and
>the f line one fifth below was drawn in red.
>This turned out to be a bit too unpractical in the long run, so
>eventually the scribes started to mark those lines with the letters C
>and F at the start instead. The letters eventually evolved into the
>modern C (alto) and F (bass) clefs.
>
>I have not seen any examples of notation using *both* coloured lines and
>clefs, but there probably were.
>
>Coloured lines certainly makes the notation easier to read - and
>prettier too ;)
Coloured display for various purposes is certainly possible, but it
would mean that the offscreen bitmap would take up much more space,
increasing the program's memory requirements considerably.
>>
>> Square-note Petrucci-style notation would be handy, too, though BarFly
>> has stretchy rubber type slugs built in at a low level, so it couldn't
>> look quite the same. You'd need some sort of space symbol that implied
>> closing a line and right-filling with blank space, as movable-type music
>> didn't generally try to make the last line the same length as the others.
>
>It seems to me you're thinking more about the late 16th century movable
>type notation (Attaingnant, Morley etc.) than Petrucci's notation here, Jack.
>But yes, it would be nice to have alternative typesetting styles with
>ABC. BarFly has a rather simple - somewhat crude (sorry Phil) - notation
>style, while abc2ps and YAPS use a rather idiomatic "early 20th century
>British trad. music" notation style. (I don't know what other abc
>programs do.)
>
>The best solution would be to use replaceable music fonts like
>commercial high-end notation programs, but I suppose that would mean
>major reworking of the software and probably not worth the effort at the
>moment.
>
BarFly was never intended for use as a musical typesetting program.
The primary purpose of its music display is to let you see what you
are doing while you browse or edit abc files. The notation style
is therefore designed to be (1) very fast, so that the music display
updates instantly with every change to the text, and (2) highly
legible on a low resolution monitor. Compare the process of editing
an abc using a text editor plus abc2ps plus ghostscript to view the
output. It's an edit-compile-view sequence for each change until you
get it right, and the display you get with MacGS is less readable than
BarFly's. Of course, once you come to print out the results on a
postscript printer abc2ps/yaps/abc2mtex win hands down.
I've thought of going over to using music fonts for display, but as
you say that would involve a major reworking. There are also still
some things I can do to improve the current display - proportional
spacing of the notes for one and antialiassing for another.
(Antialiassing softens out the jaggies at the edges of symbols
by filling them in with shades of grey - it's what Adobe Type
Manager does to make postscript fonts look nice on screen.)
Both quite complicated though, so don't hold your breath!
Phil Taylor
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