Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Bad: I'm not in my lover's arms. I have a migraine. I'm worried about feeling well enough to drive tomorrow. When I turned on the furnace, water leaked from the pipes over the boiler.

Mitigating: The leaks seem slow enough that I can just catch them in a bucket for now, until I figure out how to fix them properly. The way I feel right now is less disconcerting and less generally-ooky than last night, despite being more aware of being in pain and more sensitive to loud noises.

Good: Thanks to a major gift, I have half a tank of oil with which to fuel the furnace (which is why I was able to turn it on at last). The Redskins won this afternoon. And though I have neither as complete nor as clean a solution as I'd like (nor as pretty, but that's just a matter of tinkering), I do have slash-noteheads to indicate strumming patterns in ABC by way of embedded Postscript code handled by abcm2ps.

I still haven't gotten around to learning Postscript (it's been on my to-do list for about a decade), and the documentation for adding custom Postscript ornamemts in abcm2ps suffers from "understandable only if known" syndrome (I'm pretty sure I got that phrasing from realinterrobang), so there was a lot of guessing what uncommented bits of code meant and modifying them by trial and error. (The one place where I'll forgive uncommented code: when it's machine-generated and only intended as an intermediate product never meant to be read or edited by humans.)

I need to get around to learning Lilypond (on my to-do list for, uh, a couple years now), which does implement strum-noteheads without such a kludge -- and apparently there exist ABC-to-Lilypond conversion tools. Or maybe I'll hack the abcm2ps source to add the syntax I want and submit my changes in case they're considered suitable for the next official release ... I'll have to go peek at the guts of abcm2ps and see how well commented it is.

In case anybody else here has a need for strum marks in ABC, here's how I did it:

%%abc-edited-by  D. Glenn Arthur Jr., dglenn@radix.net
%%abc-version    2.0

% Uses features of 'abcm2ps' version 4.12.3 (documentation contains a
% warning that syntax should be considered experimental and may change
% in future versions).

% ============================ C U T === H E R E ============================
% This is the part you want to copy, along with the U: line in the tune
% header.  The rest just tests/demonstrates this.
% ===========================================================================
%%beginps
% -- strum marks (slash noteheads) -- dga 20051224
/head-slash{
    M 3 2.5 RM 2.5 SLW
    -9 -12 RL stroke}!
%%endps

% -- strum mark (slash notehead)
%%deco head-strum 0 head-slash 0 0 0 x
% ============================ C U T === H E R E ============================

X:1
T:Strum Notation Experiment
N:When processed with abcm2ps-4.12.3 the notes prefixed with 's' will have
N:their noteheads replaced with heavy slashes indicating guitar strumming.
N:Hollow noteheads for half-notes and whole-notes are not implemented, and
N:it hasn't been tested with all time values, spacing, layout options, etc.,
N:nor with down-stems. -- DGA
U:s=+head-strum+
M:C
L:1/8
K:C treble-8
 "Am" sAsAsAsA sA2 sA>sA | "Dm" sA2 sA/sA/sA "C" sA2 sA2 |\
 "Am" sA2 GA sA2 GA | "Dm" DsA/sA/ DsA/sA/ "C" CsA/sA/ CsA/sA/ |]
%%text This translates to:
[M:C]
 [A,EAce][A,EAce][A,EAce][A,EAce] [A,EAce]2 [A,EAce]>[A,EAce] |\
 [DAdf]2 [DAdf]/[DAdf]/[DAdf] [CEGce]2 [CEGce]2 |\
 [A,EAce]2 GA [A,EAce] GA |\
 D[DAdf]/[DAdf]/ D[DAdf]/[DAdf]/ C [CEGce]/[CEGce]/ C[CEGce]/[CEGce]/ |]

And if you want to see what the output looks like (the length and angle of the slashes could use tweaking, and if I knew how to make the upper end of the slash join the stem more neatly ... well, it'll do for now):