[abcusers] Version 2.0.0 voice overlay and lyrics

[John Fattaruso]

I have a question/suggestion about the new 2.0.0 standard. (Forgive me 
if this topic has been covered recently; I'm just back from a European 
choral tour, and I couldn't keep up with all the discussion over laptop 
dialup.)

As someone primarily interested in typesetting choral music, I was very 
interested in the voice overlay capability with the '&' syntax that 
emerged in abcm2ps some time ago. Many times in choral music we will 
have a vocal line splitting into two or three lines for only a few 
measures here and there, and abc shouldn't require defining a whole 
different voice for just those few measures.

I did not see any mention of this capability in the new 2.0.0 standard, 
however. Maybe I missed it?

Furthermore, it is not uncommon that when a vocal line temporarily 
splits into subvoices, that the pronounciation of lyrics in each of the 
subvoices will use slightly different rhythms. The '&' character is not 
currently defined as a separator character in a lyric specification. Is 
it possible to define the '&' for lyrics, in a manner similar to the 
note voice overlay, to generate a retrace back to the previous bar line, 
and allow multiple passes of lyrics through a bar that would be lined up 
with the multiple voice overlays? For each pass through the bar, the 
successive lines of lyrics would have to be offset vertically like what 
is done with successive verses.

John

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