Re: Typesetting chord symbols

[Carl Sorensen]

On 12/29/14 12:42 PM, "Thomas Morley" <address@hidden> wrote:

>
>I'm thinking about a major revision of our chord-naming-procedures for
>quite a while.
>Something at the lines of:
>-Don't do any formating in basic functions/definitions
>-Store all data in lists
>-As _last_ step write a formatter
>
>
>Carl, what do you think?

I think that this makes sense.  Commingling the logical information with
the presentation is a recipe for making things hard.

I think the logical data should be stored in alists, rather than lists.  I
thought about doing this a long time ago, but I couldn't figure out what
the appropriate names for the chord elements should be.

As a starter, we could have things like the following (taken from Brandt
and Roemer):

root
mode (major or minor)?
added-bass
modifiers (maybe a list -- I.e. sharp9, flat5)
polychord
omissions
inversion? (not strictly necessary for printing a chord symbol, but
probably useful for defining a chord structure -- and  I think that the
alist should be used to define the chord structure).

Some of these things already exist in the chord data structure; we
probably ought to first augment the chord data structure to capture
everything that we think is necessary.

If we can get a good set of what defines a chord structure, then we can
build the matching data structure.  And once we have a solid data
structure, we can make custom formatters relatively easily.

Thanks,

Carl