Chuck Boody On Thursday, August 26, 2004, at 04:49 AM, Phil Taylor wrote:
On 26 Aug 2004, at 05:44, Chuck Boody wrote:
First n bars would be the way to go. The layout of the title and incipit should be horozontal though, and not title above incipit.
Yes, that's what makes it tricky to do properly. I'd need a way to create and display the index with two columns; text on the left and pictures on the right.
I also wonder if you might be able to set up an interface to abc2mtex similar to the abcm2ps. John Walsh suggested abc2mtex has the indexing feature and maybe that could go to postscript. Or maybe the capability is in abcm2ps and I just haven't discovered it??
It's a long, long time since I last used abc2mtex. It was infuriatingly complex to set up, and since it hasn't been updated for many years it is now very limited compared with the modern programs. I'd rather not mess with it, unless somebody's prepared to put together a nice installer which will install abc2mtex along with musixtex on OS X.
Would your suggestion work? I think so, but as you admit the abcm2ps can do a better job a parsing because it doesn't have to do it on the fly as Barfly does. So, I have some concerns about the output from what you are suggesting. I don't think you would need to work it into the current user interface though any more that transposition or some of the other things are worked in. Come to think of it: Might it work to create a file of incipits in a manner similar to what you do with transposition? i.e. create a new file with just the incipit in it. Then you'd only need to add the proper printing routine.
BarFly's utility commands (e.g. Transpose, Change default note length etc.) all work by text to text conversion. While I could make one which converted a file of tunes into one big tune with many "parts", each of which represents the first n bars of a tune, this isn't really what you want. Another possibility would be to output a picture file containing a tall narrow picture of the text and music in two columns. You would then have to open that and print it from a graphics program. The problem there would be that you would inevitably get page breaks through the middle of some lines. I could get round that by doing the page formatting myself, and outputting multiple files which could be printed individually, each representing one page of output, but now we're getting complicated.
While I'm babbling about this: it would be nice to have control of the print size of the music. One might want to get many on a page and perhaps to get two columns on a page by keeping the output size small.
Yes, you'd really want incipits to be as small as your eyesight will allow.
In sum: Yes your suggestion would probably work. If you decide to tackle this in any way and want to pass a beta this way I'll be happy to test it.
Sure thing.
Phil Taylor
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