Tech: HTML help: italics

Subject: RE: HTML Help: italics
From: Bill D
Date: 05 Nov 10 - 08:24 PM

In my opinion, the FAR easier way to post chords is with the ^sup command.

Mary^A had a little^Dlamb^E

Subject: RE: HTML Help: italics
From: buddhuu
Date: 05 Nov 10 - 08:55 PM

JohnInKansas: Yup, the "pre" tag should do exactly what you describe. I'm not aware of that one being deprecated, but then I haven't used it for years...

  C  F  G
  Bamba Bamba

...Yes, it works fine.

@ McGrath of Harlow
You might need to play around with where you break the lines to get exactly the right result.

IMHO, this is probably one of the best ways to get lyrics and chords to line up. Personally the superscript option doesn't do as well for me as it's not so easy to cope with chord changes in the middle of words etc.

Subject: RE: HTML Help: italics
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 05 Nov 10 - 09:19 PM

I have a fair number of music "lyric books" that have the chords above the lyric, and I can scan them to PDF or DOC and cut and paste.

Alignment is difficult with most fonts because the letters aren't all the same width, and html "collapses" the spaces so that no matter how many you put in, only one out of any string of consecutive spaces is there in the post.

You could put non-breaking spaces      ( )     in, but that spoils the alignment during setup so that you can't tell if it's right except by posting (previewing).

Doing the setup in a monospaced typeface you could insert .... instead of spaces but it doesn't look very neat; and posted as ordinary text it won't necessarily be seen by others in the same font you used and most people use a variable spaced default font for viewing.

If I reformat the scanned stuff to a monospaced font like Courier, it takes very little cleanup to use the <pre> tag to post them. Unfortunately, few of the ones I have (that haven't already been posted) are of much interest to anyone here.

You do need a carriage return after the opening tag <pre> and after the last line before the closing tag </pre> to avoid "pushing" an extra space in on either top or bottom line.

The <pre> tag assures that what you typed (in monospaced text) will be seen by all readers that recognize the tag in a monospaced font, if they have one on their machine, and with all the spaces you typed.

The <sup> tag can be used, but I'd say the chord should consistently come immediately ahead of where it's played rather than after the syllable it belongs to:

^A7Mary had a ^DLittle ^ELamb

Or maybe that's what Bill D did, and he just plays a syncopated beat?

John

Subject: RE: HTML Help: italics
From: Bill D
Date: 05 Nov 10 - 10:04 PM

Your choice... before or after... if it's consistent, it will do the job when showing someone the chords.

Subject: RE: HTML Help: italics
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 05 Nov 10 - 10:12 PM

You'd get a problem there with long multi-syllabled words.

 
   D    G     D    F    G
  Mary Had a favourite lamb
        D     G   F             D
  Its fleece was variegated in colour.

Well, "pre" worked that time. (The chords wouldn't!) A useful wheeze - thanks.    And it bears out my point about how useful it can be when people ask questions rather than just using search engines.

Subject: RE: HTML Help: italics
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 05 Nov 10 - 11:41 PM

Another advantage of the ocassional repeat of a question that's been answered before is that it gives those of our tired old wheezers - - - tired of answering the "same old things," a chance to see which of the newer people have been paying attention and are willing to jump in and help.

(Sometimes it's an opportunity to see whether a previous lesson needs to be repeated a little more clearly too(?).)

If we can't pass it along, and have it repeated, then the whole "folk process" comes apart, doesn't it?

McG - I don't think the multisyllable words are much of a problem. It's fairly conventional to separate the syllables with a hyphen when lyrics are written between or beneath staves, to aid knowing how they match up with the notes, and you can pad with spaces to get room for the chords for the two (or more) separate parts of the word. This is especially useful when there's a pitch or chord change within the word.

There's usually no real need to worry about all the measures being the same length, but if you like you can mark them with "|" marks in the chord line and/or in the verse line. Of course you'd want to adjust the spaces so that the measure bars line up in both if you put them in both.

John

Subject: RE: HTML Help: italics
From: GUEST,Grishka
Date: 06 Nov 10 - 07:21 AM

Another way to put chords, without that ugly typewriter font:

C⁷
Suddenly a 

F 
man stood be-

G^{sus 4} G 
hind 

a 
me, 

F 
Asked me: "

F♯^o
Where are you 

G^{7 sus 4}  
going, 

G⁷
mate?"

(Right-click, "View source code").

Subject: RE: HTML Help: italics
From: Artful Codger
Date: 06 Nov 10 - 12:32 PM

Love the "archy and mehitabel" reference.

Ahem, most of the "oops" errors above would have been avoided if the posters bothered to PREVIEW THEIR POSTS, which has also been repeatedly recommended, especially when you post messages with embedded HTML.

Note that many things people post here are ill-formed HTML--the errors just happen to be treated benignly by some browsers (for the time being). The most common errors are failing to encode ampersands, angle brackets, accented characters and symbols; and improperly closing or nesting tags. For instance, the only time you should type raw angle brackets is as part of an HTML tag; an angle bracket followed by a space (as in Sugwash's message) is improper, as are bare angle brackets in ABC. And nesting I and B tags within a tag of the same type is dicey, if not illegal outright.

Someone above suggested that if you want to quote someone, retaining his formatting, then cut-n-paste from an HTML source view. Don't do it. It's too easy to create ill-formed HTML that way. First, you may end up nesting their italics within your own. Second, you may end up importing a start or end tag without its mate.

Even worse is to import text this way from other sites or word processors. It may contain style references which aren't defined here--word processors are particularly likely to use such proprietary style information. Or you may be pasting HTML corresponding to a later version than the Mudcat pages support, or which is in reality XHTML, XML or some other format which only superficially resembles HTML. So unless you're HTML-savvy--and careful--don't copy raw HTML. It's better to paste unformatted text and add formatting tags yourself, tedious as this may be. And preview before submitting.

Unfortunately, even previewing may not expose some common errors--Mudcat input validation seems limited to suppressing tags that might allow hacking, not to detecting ill-formed or non-portable constructs.

Subject: RE: HTML Help: italics
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 06 Nov 10 - 01:46 PM

GUEST,Grishka -

I've used what I think would be the Word equivalent of your method for printed lyrics, but it would take some study to feel comfortable with it in html.

In Word, you can insert a formula field, use the array switch to stack two elements one above the other, align left. Put the chord in as the first element and the lyric up to the next chord. Repeat.

In "field view" in Word your first <div looks like

{eq \a \al (C⁷,Suddenly a )}

Shift-F9 switches it to the "text view" that you print, which should look just like your first bit.

Note for those who want to try it, the { and } are not characters you type. You have to "Insert Field" or "Ctl-F9" to insert them as "field markers." The rest of it can just be typed in. Shift-F9 is a toggle that flips you between viewing the code and viewing the result.

And of course Ctl-= toggles in and out of subscript, Ctl-Shift-= (same as Ctl-+) toggles in and out of superscript.

Once you have the array set up, you can copy and paste it to repeat, and just change what's inside the ().

John

Subject: RE: HTML Help: italics
From: GUEST,Grishka
Date: 06 Nov 10 - 03:13 PM

John, we're waiting patiently for your results.

The method I would prefer for that purpose is the following:

Choose three characters you don't need otherwise, such as *, $, and §. (If your song is about sex, money, law, or all of these, take different ones.) Use an ordinary editor such as Notepad, write down each chord, followed by the first of those characters, then the corresponding text, then the second or third character depending on whether it's the end of a line.

When you have finished writing the whole song, perform three "search & replace"s to produce the <div> tags as in my example. Note that the latter is an experiment, we may still refine the trick.

And indeed, nobody should post any tags she/he does not understand, even if the visual result seems flawless. Count your end tags etc.

Subject: RE: HTML Help: italics
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 06 Nov 10 - 03:52 PM

All getting a bit too complicated for me, and I suspect for most of us. I suppose I'm glad there are some people who understand this stuff.

Subject: RE: HTML Help: italics
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 06 Nov 10 - 04:38 PM

Many things well worthwhile take a little effort to work up your own best method. The encouraging thing is that a method that really works well for you becomes easy (and fun) just like some people say they've found when learning something new about how to play their bassoon.

The first step usually is deciding that you need to do something that isn't trivially simple.

The next step often is deciding "how good does it really need to be;" but sometimes you get lucky and find a method that really does it all pretty easily.

Unlike some here, I seldom consider throwing a new program at every new problem, at least until I've finished the RTFM for what I've got, but you have to use the method that you find best and easiest.

Of course for things you post here, somebody will tell you if your method is less than satisfactory ; D)

John

Subject: RE: HTML Help: Chord symbols
From: GUEST,Grishka
Date: 06 Nov 10 - 05:25 PM

If there is a genuine demand for well-aligned chord symbols the way I sketched above, I think we can devise a little program to do the tricky part of the work for you. For example, you may set the chord symbols in brackets initially, then type Ctrl-a, Ctrl-c, double-click on the Magic Tool, Ctrl-v, Submit Message for preview.

Less than satisfactory? Really desirable? Want silver paper with it?

Grishka

Subject: RE: HTML Help: italics
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 06 Nov 10 - 05:50 PM

That "pre" thing is simple enough, and it seems to work OK. As the saying goes, Keep It Simple Stupid.

Subject: RE: HTML Help: italics
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 06 Nov 10 - 08:44 PM

Excellent thread. I asked about how to do italics and now I feel I'm three-quarters of the way to some degree or other. Cheers! :-)