On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 05:58:42AM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Irwin Oppenheim wrote - > > >Using ! and !..! in one and the same > >tune may lead to disaster if you make a small typo. So, > >while "!" should definitely be supported, I encourage > >you to support "*" as well. > > It just seems to make a messy situation more complicated.
I agree. I'm unhappy and confused about this. I have just become able to use ! staffbreaks, in the last few days, with their addition to some of the abc->ps family (or perhaps, my awareness of that, following the discussion here). Simultaneously with this, I'm hearing that they "shouldn't" be mixed with !decoration!s. But if I need decorations in a tune, and want to control the printing layout, and keep it readable ? "Pick any 2", sure. But, if all 3 can be done, it's asking a lot of people to suggest they not do them. I really don't think the idea of constructs that "shouldn't" be used in the same tune is a flyer. If I have a tune with decorations, and want to add a staffbreak somewhere, I'm just not going to delete the decorations. And I'm one of the people that's at least trying to pay attention. I suppose what I'm saying is that asking the general abc-writing public to have symathy with the poor developers in coping with stuff that's murder to parse properly is just something that won't happen. And, is this reccomendation on the level of a single tune, or does it, actually, apply on the file level ? How about alternate tunes in a file, one using just ! staffbreaks and the next using just !...! decorations, will software be happy with this ? BarFly wants the user to tell it which, I gather ? And along with this, the new draft says the the character to use for staff-break is something that no software I have implements. So I'm not in a position to follow such a standard however much I'd like to. I'm not very sure what I think of a "spec." that tries to tell developers what meanings they have to change in their existing code, but _if_ that's where we are ... Either the ! is used for both purposes and parsers will have to accept this as normal, rather than tryng to persuade people not to do it, or something'll have to change ... > As far as I can tell, !...! is much less widely used, the collections that > use it and the software that implements it are still maintained. It could be > changed. I hear the cry "Why should we?" I reply "For the greater good of > abc." I agree. I'd think ! should be staffbreak, both for the amount of existing stuff, and usability with abc2win, and for Jack's point about visual intrusiveness. And that then suggests *decoration*, which - as Bryan says - _could_ be done in abcm2ps, etc, *if* Jeff agrees; and visually, I think it works better; by analogy with my emphasis in the previous line - it follows the general ascii conventional usage. But, the raw fact is, in the case of conflict between software and spec. people will do what their software implements. There's no choice. And they seem to be headed in different directions - which is where we came in. -- Richard Robinson "The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
