ABC conversion problems

Subject: RE: ABC conversion problems
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 01:17 PM

Cleaning up copy/pastes from web pages is generally a bit messy, due to ambiguity about the line breaks.

It may be helpful to know that if you paste first into Word, and have the "view all" setting turned on to show all the "funny stuff" you'll often see two kinds of line breaks. The common one used in documents is the paragraph break (shown in Word as the "Pilcrow" ¶) and the other is a line break shown as a "broken arrow."

You can use Word to quickly "clean up" mixed line breaks, using the "Edit|Find" - or better, the "Edit|Replace" (Quick-key Alt-E, E) function.

In Word, you can find the "broken arrow" line break by putting "^011" in the "Find What" box. (without the quotes). You can also use that "code" in the "Replace With" box to insert the line break. (The character has ASCII value 011.)

In Word the "paragraph" character is a "misbred bastard combination" that can't be easily "coded" as an ASCII/Unicode character, but you can use "^p" to find it or to use it as a replacement for another character in Word Find/Replace.

If you put ^011 in the "Find What" box and ^p in the "Replace With" box, "Replace All" will make everything "paragraphs." (You could of course swap the box entries to make everything line breaks.)

If you replace ^p^p with ^p you get rid of all the "double paragraph breaks" - provided you repeat the "Replace All" until no changes are made. (Word may sometimes refuse to replace the "end of document" paragraph break, so if you don't get to "no replacements" after a few repeats, use "Find Next" to make sure that isn't hanging up the cleaning. It's safest to delete the first ¶ of the end pair manually.)

Before "pasting" into a conversion program you should of course Save As plain text to get rid of "extraneous Wordness" features, and may want to open the saved .txt in Notepad or other "cleaner" editor for the paste.

Most ABC scripts are short enough to clean up manually, if you use an editor that shows you what's there; but when you get a whole web page full of mixed linebreaks automation (global replace) may be useful.

John

Subject: RE: ABC conversion problems
From: GUEST,Chris P.
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 12:38 PM

ABCexplorer ignores empty lines, except the one before the X: field to denote a new tune, I believe.

Subject: RE: ABC conversion problems
From: Mysha
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 12:20 PM

Hi,

Fiddler's Companion misuse the html a bit in their abc: To change to a new line, they start a new paragraph, rather than use a line break. A paragraph will normally leave a white line between the lines, but they catch that by using a style that shrinks that white line to almost nothing.

Unfortunately, that means that if you try to copy their abc code, you will get the extra white lines as well. Apparently, concertina.net was not built to accept weird things like that, and conversion fails.

I wonder if this is solvable. I'll contact CONCERTINA.net to see what they say.

                                                                  Mysha

Subject: RE: ABC conversion problems
From: clueless don
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 10:14 AM

The following is from the Fiddler's Companion site:

**Please note that the abc's in the Fiddler's Companion work fine in most abc conversion programs. For example, I use abc2win and abcNavigator 2 with no problems whatsoever with direct cut-and-pasting. However, due to an anomaly of the html, pasting the abc's into the concertina.net converter results in double-spacing. For concertina.net's conversion program to work you must remove the spaces between all the lines of abc notation after pasting, so that they are single-spaced, with no intervening blank lines. This being done, the F/C abc's will convert to standard notation nicely. Or, get a copy of abcNavigator 2 – its well worth it.   [AK]

[end of quote]

So, the first step is to eliminate the spaces between lines, once the code has been pasted into the concertina.net converter. If that doesn't work, you may also have to eliminate one of more header lines - in particular, I believe that a header beginning with "F:" will cause things to fail or at least be botched up.

Good luck!

Don

Subject: RE: ABC conversion problems
From: GUEST
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 10:10 AM

As it says on the Fiddler's Companion site:

"However, due to an anomaly of the html, pasting the abc's into the concertina.net converter results in double-spacing. For concertina.net's conversion program to work you must remove the spaces between all the lines of abc notation after pasting, so that they are single-spaced, with no intervening blank lines. This being done, the F/C abc's will convert to standard notation nicely."

There is also a nice conversion program at www.folkinfo.org although this suffers from the same problem as concertina.net on the Fiddler's companion tunes.

Subject: ABC conversion problems
From: Banjovey
Date: 14 Aug 08 - 09:57 AM

I have been trying to paste ABC files from Fiddler's Companion into the Concertina conversion programme with little success. Does any-one know how to make this work or can recommend an alternative ABC converter?
Thanks