Phil Taylor writes: | On 7 Jun 2004, at 08:46, Paulo Eleut=E9rio Tib=FArcio wrote: | > Em Qua 02 Jun 2004 12:47, John Chambers escreveu: | >> Jack Campin writes: | > [snip] | >> | > The problem is how best to say this. | >> | > There is a list of headers that could contain a code for "no | >> | > notes". This field already uses a double quote to indicate that | >> | > accompaniment chords are present. I wonder if there's a good | >> | > single char that could stand for "notes", or maybe for "no | >> | > notes"? Perhaps '*' (asterisk) could be used for this, as it | >> | > doesn't seem to have any other use, and it is conventionally | >> | > used to indicate an explanatory footnote. | >> | | >> | That sounds pretty good. | >> | >> Maybe I'll try implementing it. | >> | > I don't think that would be a good idea. IMHO any characters that | > might still be available should be reserved to signal new, more | > productive contexts. ...
This was a total misunderstanding of what I was talking about. I wasn't suggesting any new ABC syntax. The question was how to get my Tune Finder to indicate to a user that an ABC "tune" contains no notes. The problem there is that the Tune Finder's output is getting to be rather wide, making for problems using it on a small screen. Adding a wordy comment would make this problem worse. | Why not just use a "tune" which consists of a single barline? That is | actually a minimal legal tune. BarFly will display an empty staff, with | title, composer clef and metre. (Otherwise you get an error message | which says "No tune".) Not sure what other parsers will do. One problem I can see is getting people to follow any such suggestion. The canonical example is the fact that we can't even get people to include an "X:" line at the start of tunes, although ABC's syntax has required it from the early days. Getting people to type some code to indicate that there aren't any notes would be rather hopeless, I'd guess. Most people would consider it as silly as those "This page intentionally left blank" notices. ("But it's obviously not blank." ;-) I do often include a few lines containing just a bar line for tunes that I don't have the notes for. With abc2ps, this gets me a few staff lines when I try printing it, which is convenient for writing in notes. But this is just my own occasional practice. I'd think what we'd want software to do is flag noteless tunes with a warning, but process them anyway. Tune info without notes can be useful, as we can see by the popularity of Andrew Kuntz's Fiddler's Companion site. And having this info in the form of ABC headers can be useful, especially if you're the sort that likes to write little scripts that combine files in interesting ways. I also have a few "tunes" that contain "W:" lines but no notes. With abc2ps, this gets you the usual sort of output that has titles, notes, history, etc, plus the lyrics. In fact, I have a little perl script that strips out the notes from a tune, leaving behind the headers and lyrics. I don't use it much, but when I want that done, it's nice to have software that does it right. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html