Werner wrote
>PS: In the early days of PMX there was a PMX-external pattern,
> which could be modified to influence beaming. IIRC this
> was proposed to Don by a non-musician who is mentioned
> at the end of the PMX-documentation.
As years go by, it gets harder and harder to remember what happened X years
ago. Two reason: (1) even healthy memories fade, and (2) we get older and
our memory stops working so well. Here, X is about 7, but strangely enough
I do remember pretty clearly what happened with beams. Werner is close but
not exactly right. The general approach that my friend John Di Pol
suggested back then is still in place. It depends on having a table of
binary numbers (masks). Each bit represents the span of a 32nd note and
each number represents a longer span of time which may be a full bar, a half
of a bar, or a third of a bar, depending on the meter. Consecutive strings
of 1's represent spans of time which--if filled up with beamable notes--will
be beamed. When I first implemented this I worked out the default sets of
masks but I allowed the user to change the defaults if he wanted to. By
giving the user this override capability, I obligated myself to explain the
whole mess in the manual. It took up lots of space in the manual, it
complicated the coding somewhat, and no one ever asked me anything about it
so I assume no one ever used the override option. So I quickly took out the
option, but left the basic scheme intact, always using the default set of
masks. At the same time, I introduced the forced-beam commands "[", "]" .
--Don Simons
