From: "Phil Taylor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > It's not so much the use of ! to force a line break, as the ignoring of > line ends in the text that breaks the standard. All other programs > have placed musical line breaks where the text line breaks are, except > when preceded by a backslash.
No! If a piece of software ignores the "standard" that line break=>music break, when reading then it is most certainly not breaking the standard, it is merely ignoring it. The standard for abc files is completely intact, and othe programs are still free to implement it. If a program fails to write new lines where they are intended, then so what? Page formatting in abc is rudimentary to say the least, and surely any decent abc-reading software will have a method of coping with the case where the line which has been read in is too wide for the page. However if a file is written with a single ! to mean a line break, when the standard says these should be used in pairs around things like !pp!, (or vice versa) then that breaks the standard completely: other programs will not be able to read that file. > It causes us a lot of trouble. We can't fix it and we can't persuade > its author to fix it. We used not to be hostile towards it; in its > early days it was widely admired, but then its author stopped > contributing to this list, and wouldn't fix even simple things > (like the fact that it misinterprets the Q: field and plays everything > at the wrong tempo). He's left us a messy legacy of files that we > have to deal with. Not really irrational, just pointless. I still think its signature at the end of the file is the best hope. If other software detects that when extracting individual pieces from abc files and acts appropriately, then there is a chance. If people extract tunes - eg by hand -without acting on it then it will cause problems. (But given that abc is specifically writable by hand, there are always going to be difficult files. This is one reason for making the standard as easy as possible to understand - and I commend Guido's efforts.) Dave David Webber Author of MOZART the music processor for Windows - http://www.mozart.co.uk Member of the North Cheshire Concert Band http://www.northcheshire.org.uk To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
