On Wed, 2 Jul 2003, David Webber wrote:
I suspect that the only things the abc standard has to worry about, as far as applications on different platforms go, is to do with specification of text fonts
The actual font type to be used is a typical issues for the stylesheet meta standard.
and definition of (accented etc) characters in text.
The ABC standard itself should make it possible to specify the code page in which the text inside the ABC tune is coded. It is probably safe to assume iso8859-1 (Latin-1) as default, if nothing is specified by the user. This way the user could also choose e.g. Unicode as codepage.
My feelings on encoding for machine-readable ABC:
For syntax (e.g., everything that isn't "text", stick to stricty 7-bit ASCII characters. No accents, no other funny stuff. Just straight 7-bit ASCII.
For stuff that can be text (chords, words, labels, titles, etc) use UTF-8 encoded UNICODE.
This has a couple of advantages:
First, UTF-8 is a well-known, well-discussed standard that people seem to be going towards. There is language support for it in most modern-day programming environments, and there are libraries designed to support it available (or standard) on most platforms.
Second, UTF-8 is capable, by design, of being able to encode any valid UNICODE character, now or in the future. Which means it's capable of handling most currently known languages, and has room for expansion. Those who want to use ABC to notate Klingon Opera may have to go elsewhere -- the UNICODE committee has repeatedly denied the Klingon Language Institute's petitions to include encoding for that language.
Third, UTF-8 is designed so that Latin-1 characters are encoded as-is (which also means that 7-bit ASCII characters are encoded as-is), so all existing ABC files that use either ASCII only or Latin-1 are automatically in UTF-8 already.
Furthermore, the set of supported accent escapes such as \'a should be properly defined in the ABC standard.
Groeten, Irwin Oppenheim [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~*
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