#393 Vertical Bar usage change
It is becoming increasingly prevalent for musicians to present textual representation of music staves on a chord chart. This provides indication of beats in the bar with chord placements for intros or interludes etc.
The format typically uses vertical bars for measures, with back slashes for played beats, dots for rests, colons for repeats sections. e.g.
*Instrumental & Bridge*
F#m E
||: D \ \ \ | \ \ F#m \ | E \ . . | \ \ F#m E/G# |
| A \ \ \ | \ \ A E | D \ . . | \ \ F#m E :||
The current OpenSong format shows the following items:
- "|" Vertical bars are replaced with spaces on lead sheets, and new lines in the Presenter.
- "||" Double vertical bars are replaced by "new slide" in the Presenter and ignored when printing lead sheets. Double vertical bars must be at the end of the line.
Also ..
- If a line contains ("-!!") this indicates the location where a page break should be placed in the lead sheet when printing longer songs.
The vertical bars in the current OpenSong format prevents the use of this method.
It would be useful if an alternative formatting set is introduced (this could be selected in the settings using a check box etc)
In contrast, but similerly to the page break, I propose the use of a tilde and the exclamation for presenter line and slide breaks.
- "~!" Tilde exclaimations are replaced with spaces on lead sheets, and new lines in the Presenter.
- "~!!" Tilde with Double exclamations are replaced by "new slide" in the Presenter and ignored when printing lead sheets. Double vertical bars must be at the end of the line.
This will enable the use of vertical bars in music notation / score representation. (I cannot find a convenient alternative character that spans PC, Mac, Linus and Android that could be used a a bar line)
Discussion
Anonymous
There's no doubt that there are some things that could be redesigned in the song input area. One of the issues that we struggle with is that it has to be all things to all people: some use it only for lyrics for projection (that's my church's primary usage), and some have a stronger focus on using it to create aids to guide the musicians. OpenSong is showing its age here: 12 or more years have passed since Sean developed the original format for song entry, and my extensions that added some additional page formatting aren't much newer.
If we can do this without significantly increasing the amount of "spaghetti code" in the source or breaking backward compatibility, I think it's something we can consider for a future release.
The current developper version kind of supports this kind of notation
Vertical bars are preserved in chord lines (starting with a dot). All other characters used here do not have any special meaning and thus are preserved also, with the exception of whitespace. Since there is no text line with which the chords will get aligend, each sequence of non-whitespace characters is separated by an em-space (i.e. a space the same width as an 'M'-character).
The page break line (-!! at the start of a line) is unaffected, as are | and || in lyrics lines. The suggested replacements using ~ are not needed for the purpose of displaying such enhanced chord lines.