Steve Mansfield wrote:
| Can I just sincerely apologise to everyone on the list
|
| (especially rjp, who will probably kill me at band practise tomorrow)
|
| for accidentally restarting the V: wars again?
No, we won't forgive you! It's about time that someone made this
mistake. Maybe we can hear what (if anything) has happened in the
various V-enabled abc apps since the last go-around.
As I may have mentioned recently, I've been doing a bit of hacking at
my abc2ps clone to see if I could get my abc tune finder to handle
the various V lines that are Out There. My impression is that, aside
from the old octave question for non-treble clefs, there are few if
any actual incompatibilities in the implementations of V lines. That
is, if you merge all the fields into a single list, there don't seem
to be any real contradictions. It's just that different programmers
have implemented different capabilities. And the resulting syntax is
a bit more complex than need be.
So calling it a "war" isn't really accurate. It's more a case of a
number of different people talking past each other about what
features are needed, and not much paying attention to what the others
want. This is to be expected, of course. But a bunch of people
sitting around, each talking only to themselves, hardly qualifies as
a war.
Since most of the tune finder's users seem to want it to return staff
notation (usually in GIF - yuck!), the most useful thing for me would
be a program that joined all the features having to do with music
formatting. I've been seriously tempted to take what I have and try
to merge it with abcm2ps. That would probably be the most powerful
abc formatter around, at least for a few weeks.
(The main reason for my not using abcm2ps now is that I and several
others are now addicted to the code I added to handle explicit key
signatures, extended repeat notation, and funny clefs. This is more
important to me than the ability to put two voices on one staff,
which is really just a matter of saving paper. But it would be nice
if I could also correctly deliver some of the 2-staff 4-voice vocal
abc that has appeared at a few sites, not to mention some of the
!foo! goodies.)
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