>> I used to hear his reel "The Apple Tree" a lot a few years ago, >> it seems to have gone out of fashion. > [...] >> A2 a2 fe`dc| Aa`ga fe`dc|[1 Bc`de fB`Bc| Bcde fefa:|! > i play it... and sometimes people recognise it, but more often not. > at least i'm pretty sure it's the same tune, but i'm not very good > at humming through raw abc. > my abc converter barfs at the backquotes in the above line. > do you know what they're supposed to signify? my copy > of the abc documentation doesn't mention this character.
It's a relatively recent feature, introduced at my suggestion. It's a kind of null character; it provides a way of spacing out ABC notes to allow for more readable alignment of parallel phrases, but without breaking beams as an actual space would. In most fonts ` is very unobtrusive, and while most character sets have a nonbreaking space somewhere, they don't agree on its ordinal position, so ` gives a portable near-equivalent from the ASCII set. Current ABC software handles it correctly - it was implemented in both abcm2ps and BarFly within a week of me suggesting it, which makes it the fastest-ever- agreed-on feature added to ABC. If your ABC software can't handle it, just delete all occurrences of it first with a text editor. The other sneaky thing I did in that was to use ! for a linebreak - that wasn't formerly standard, but ABC2WIN used it, and I argued for a long time that it was a good idea, so it's become more widely adopted (though BarFly's implementation of it isn't quite right yet). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files and CD-ROMs of Scottish music. ----> off-list mail to "j-c" rather than "scots-l" at this site, please <---- Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
