On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 03:32:03PM +0100, Phil Taylor wrote: > Richard Robinson wrote: > > >It runs into a much more general question, actually - if you re-order > >tunes in an ABc file, how do you handle any interposed non-ABC text, > >where should it go ? I don't think there's a clean answer to this. > > I think you are right. BarFly doesn't re-order the original file though, > it just pulls the tunes out for printing in the specified order, ignoring > the interstitial text. You can always read the text, and if you want you > can print the contents of the file as text. Since BarFly's editor can > handle embedded pictures, I could also at some point add a command which > would replace the abc tunes with pictures, leaving the interstitial text > between them. Printing that would be a nightmare though. > > On the whole though I think that forced pagebreaks and other such printing > options are better handled outside of the abc in my case. Perhaps I could > add a symbol to the index to indicate that this tune should start a new page. > If the index was sorted differently that tune would still carry the mark, > so it would be obvious to the user.
Yes. This is the point at which an ABC GUI has to shift onto an entirely different level - it moves from being a tune editor/interface into becoming an entire page-layout scheme, which is a whole separate issue. <usual rant> I really _wish_ the layout/typesetting command could have been marked, with, eg "%%abc2ps newpage", in the same way as the original midi ones were. It might have at least made issues like this easier to think about. </usual rant> I've played around with trying to build GUIs for this (don't hold your breath - nothing likely to be fit to use, or even look at, for a long time. Anybody got any favourite perl/gui toolkits ?), and the only approach that works for me (that I've been able to think of so far) is very like what you describe - a "layout" mode, with interstitial text (good phrase) displayed and editable and the tunes presented as some kind of "link" (title, picture, whatever) to an editing interface on that tune (and a facility to print/postscript the whole thing by passing it through abcm2ps, or some such external), and a separate "database" mode - just list the tunes, with searching & sorting & filtering and so on, where you can print each tune individually or select them somehow for adding into a "page-layout". The 2 situations, tune and page, have to be kept separate somehow, it seems to me, they're on different levels. -- 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
