Richard Robinson writes: | | Yes. Also all those Balkan ones, where it would be nice to write 7 as | (4+3)/4, 18 as (4+3+3+4+4)/8, or whatever.
Actually, abc2ps and clones should handle this without any problem. I've done this (with or without parens) in a number of tunes. The one qualification might be that the '+' doesn't look all that good in print. It tends to overlap the 4th staff line, and it's too wide. I tend to use '.', mostly because it looks better. Some simple tests show that the parser isn't too picky about what's before or after the '/'. That's good for a music formatter. It's maybe not so wonderful if you're trying to write a player. Another thing I did that was useful was to have the code that handles the Q: line notice things that look like notes (2/4, 3/8, etc.) and replace them with the actual notes. Then I can write something like Q: 1/8 3/16=60 and it gets drawn with the two notes followed by "=60". This is a fairly conventional way of giving a tempo for such complex rhythms. Not that I use Q: lines much. In fact, it's often more useful to just produce the notes without a tempo. So Q: 1/8 1/8 3/16 1/8 1/8 would draw the conventional 5-note rhythm tipoff for a kopanica. Any Balkan musician would know the approximate tempo. I wonder if this violates anything in the standard? I think there are other abc programs that will handle, say, Q: 1/4=120 in the usual way, and draw a quarter note for the 1/4. I just made it do the substitution for any fraction that looks like a note length. The original abc2ps did some of this, but it didn't always work; what I did was more of a debugging job with a lot of Balkan test cases. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
