Re: Suggestion to make sharps and flats persistent

[David Nalesnik]

On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 11:17 AM Urs Liska <address@hidden> wrote:
[...]
> I think there are only two reliable (and therefore reasonable)
> approaches. Either you encode a pitch at what it "is" (a f sharp is
> always an f sharp) or you encode it at how it is printed (a note in the
> first staff space of a treble clef is encoded as "f" and will be
> rendered as an f in c major but as an f sharp in d major. I really
> dislike this idea but it is done so for example in MEI,

In MEI, true, but actually messier:
@accid Captures a written accidental.
@accid.ges Records the performed pitch inflection.

So, to create valid MIDI output from a MEI document, an F-sharp which
appears with no sharp because there's a sharp in the key signature
would need
to be encoded with @accid.ges.

(Rather annoying if you are creating MEI files programmatically.)

> also Amadeus'
> input language works that way, and a power user insisted to me it is
> superior because it doesn't cause ambiguity but substantially less
> keystrokes).
>
> But having "f" behave depending on what has been encoded before is
> begging for disaster. Copy&paste has already been mentioned, but I
> think it is already harder to *read* in the input file. This by far
> outweighs the saved keystrokes IMHO.
>
> My 2cts
> Urs
>
>

Best,
David Nalesnik