> From: "I. Oppenheim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 00:32:27 +0200 (W. Europe Daylight Time) > [...] > > > All the standard says is : << Generally one line of abc > > > notation will produce one line of music, although if the > > > music is too long it will overflow onto the next line.>> > > > But I take it that the sentence above means that it WILL > > break at a line end and MAY break elsewhere... > > Maybe you're correct on that.
"Generally" does not translate to "WILL" in my book. In standards- speak it sounds like a suggestion - maybe even a strong suggestion - but not a mandate. In pure English it sounds like a description of what most programs at the time of writing were doing, and I find that a weak argument for implementing this interpretation as a standard. > > The problem as a developer is that we're second-guessing > > writers of "bad" abc notation. > > Anyway, I think it's a better approach to let the software do > the formatting of the music lines unless the user forces a > line break, with for example the "!" notation found in the > BNF standard. In general, software should not assume that an > ABC file was meant to be print so it would bad to give to > much weight to the exact position of newlines in the file. I wholeheartedly agree, for several reasons: 1. Text file formatting is notoriously succeptible to modification. Text editors and word processors can "help you" by providing a word- wrap feature unexpectedly; moving text files between DOS, VMS, Unix and Mac systems can cause interesting interpretations of the newline characters; web page authors may cut-n-paste without prepending a forced line break (<BR> or <BR>), and the list goes on for quite awhile. Someone here called it the line break daemon -- excellent coinage. I think I'll use that to summarize this family of problems in the future. 2. Writers of ABC text may have different motivations for line breaks than the formatting of the music score. I break my ABC into the lines of the quattrains of the verses of the song, since in traditional folk music there's often much repetition-except-for-two-measures going on. Formatting the text file to follow the quattrains allows me to use basic cut-n-paste techniques to great time-saving advantage. But when the music prints, I don't want to waste the right half of the page; print it like normal music, eh? 3. Imagine the frustration of trying to manually format ABC such that your line breaks line up with where the end of the musically printable page is located. "Oops, missed by three notes. Okay, let's re-edit the whole file so *THIS* line breaks properly and print again. Darn, now I appear to be a measure short on the second line. Re-edit again and print. Shucks, now it wraps mid-bar. Darn it! Re-edit again. Print. Examine. Re-edit. Print. Examine. Re-edit..." May as well draw it with a felt tip pen on school paper. My first commanding officer had a huge banner on the wall behind his desk: "Using a computer should be easier than not using a computer." A motto to live by. I would urge the standards-developers to STRONGLY consider letting ABC be a mostly-freeform, mostly-whitespace-ignorant langauge. Using a special character (such as the aforementioned ! character) to indicate a forced line break on the music is far preferable (and infinitely more flexible) than assuming line-break in the ABC source file must be an actual break in printing. Two cents, and all that rot. _______________ Steven K. Mariner [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~marinersk/ http://www.whirlyjigmusic.com/ To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
