On 31 Jul 2003 at 12:50, I. Oppenheim wrote: > > The sections are now all numbered. > http://www.joods.nl/~chazzanut/abc/abc2-draft.html >
Thank you for adopting my numbering suggestion. Section 6.1 Deprecated fields "An E: field was once used by abc2mtex to explicitly control note spacing: this is no longer necessary with current formatting algorithms." This is erroneous because E: is still used by abc2mtex to control note spacing. Whether or not you consider it is necessary is irrelevant. I agree that the postscript systems produce nice output and I may well use it in the near future for typesetting duets, but I like using my TeX based system for a whole series of reasons. I write ABC which fully conforms to ABC 1.6.1 and use features of TeX to customise the output. This is useful when re-typesetting music which is already published when a new edition is required, and it is necessary not to disturb the layout too much. The version ABC 1.7.6, I recently downloaded still claims to be a draft. I therefore suppose agreement was never reached, so 1.6.1 remains as the last standard. I understand that various developers extended this standard in various ways which were not mutually compatible and I guess did not implement those parts which were TeX-oriented. I welcome the attempt to develop a new standard, if the motive is to get allow the various dialects of ABC to speak to one another. However, if this new standard excludes ABC written for abc2mtex, then I oppose the project entirely. I question whether this is a revision or, rather, hijacking the standard for the convenience of a later implementation. If this is the case, it should take a new name (ABC+) and leave ABC for the old standard. I was planning to upgrade abc2mtex program, and would obviously attempt to make other dialects of ABC intelligible to it especially where these conform to a later standard, but if the new standard scorns backward compatibility to the origins of ABC, I will develop software for my own benefit. So, either: The entry should read "The E: field is used by abc2mtex to explicitly control note spacing, but this is not included in this standard and ABC written according to standards 1.6.1 and earlier may or may not be compatible with software written to this standard". and the new standard should be called ABC+ or: we should decide in favour of backwards compatibily and write ALL the aspects of 1.6.1 into 2.0.0. Software developers would be free to ignore the features they did not wish to implement, but software which claims to be compatible with 2.0.0 and later should not fall over when presented with valid 1.6.1 ABC. Obviously, I prefer the latter. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
