Phil Taylor wrote: (of the & operator) > > My take on it is that the & operator sets the time point > of the music back to the previous bar line, and the notes > which follow it form a temporary voice in parallel with > the preceding one. I suspect that this should only be used > to add one complete bar's worth of music for each &. >
With this limitation, it seems reasonable. It's in abc2mtex, without that limitation, for writing multiple-staff music. I used it exactly once, on something quite simple, and the abc quickly became unreadable, and, worse, nearly un-editable. But...it *did* do what I wanted. > It seems like a good idea to me provided that we don't get > carried away. In MusicXML there is a similar construct, > with the addition that you can switch staves as you set the > time point back, and the Dolet plugins for Finale and > Sibelius use this extensively for e.g. Piano music. Every > bar contains all of the parts, right and left hand, bass > and treble clef. It's an absolute nightmare! > This pretty well matches my experience. I concluded that if I were to use this any more, I'd need a pre-processor of some sort... So if we want to preserve human-readability and use the & in any complicated way, it might be worthwhile discussing alternatives. Cheers, John Walsh To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html