>> Developers are *not* the only people who get a say in what ABC ought
>> to be, or what it should be used for.
> O yes they are! all the Linux software for abc is FREE, so I think
> nobody has the right to ask the `developers' to do ANYTHING. - without
> paying them that is!
The point is that since ABC is just text, a user like me can put whatever
the hell they like in it, and whether any computer implementation can
make sense of it is a secondary issue. Luckily for me, BarFly doesn't
get too badly flummoxed by the notations I need to use.
ABC doesn't even need to be constrained by typeability. I have hundreds
of pages of ABC written in pencil. For most of it, I notated the slurs
by drawing them above the text lines in the same way as in staff notation:
much more readable, and easy to convert when I got round to typing it in.
I don't give a damn whether anyone implements a computer analogue of that.
I also have a bunch of cue cards written in two colours of ink giving
the first bar or two of tunes in sets I play. Needless to say these do
not have regular header fields, they'd be a waste of space. It's non-
standard and non-computer-processable ABC but it's still ABC (i.e. any
human who knew the notation could read it) and it's useful.
> That way, abc can still be used to `sketch' the music & express
> the salient points, whilst adding the `bells and whistles' using
> something else that CAN ALREADY do it...
> This could of course, result in loss of detail when abc is re-exported,
> which one would have to accept, since any conceivable abc notation
> will still probably be insufficient for a lot of the advanced music
> typograpy..
This is arse-backwards for what I'm doing. I need to be able to notate
every single musically relevant detail from my sources - mistakes and
all. Some of this information might be lost in editing/typesetting.
My ABC source is richer in musical information than a typographic file
would be.
> The only other course open to someone determined not to pay
> for software but still wanting special funstions is to do
> what the rest of us do - get out gcc / emacs / TeX and get started!
I'd like to, but (a) the abc2mtex port for the Mac doesn't work and is
unsupported and (b) nobody's done an MPW port of any PS or TeX converter
that I could use as a starting point (MPW is the only free C compiler
for the Mac). I know zilch about GUI programming, have no interest in
learning it, and am not about to waste a year of my life reinventing
wheels. If I can get one of my old Suns working, I'll be in a better
position to do some ABC implementation, as I'll be able to disregard
the GUI stuff.
=================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> ===================
To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
