Re: ITRANS Song Format, original RMIM post by Anurag Shankar

Date: 8 Feb 2003 12:52:25 -0800
Newsgroups: rec.music.indian.misc
Size: 2,640 bytes

Certain logical deviations are allowed in the format of various
entries for the rasons that UVR correctly explained.
I guess during the evolution of ISB, much of the unnecessarily
complicated stuff got simplified automatically (in somewhat
similar way as the tail gradually disappeared from the human
species). The maintainers did not required a few particular
features so they gradually became unimportant (for some logical
reasons of course).
For example, it is of no harm keeping the song file name
(or number) in the file, however it became unnecessary
as the number and the name of the file were kept same.
Now, if one is editing/searching the file manually he
anyway knows what is file name he is editing/searching.
Also if the files are being processed using a perl/shell script
the script can retrieve the song number from the
file name variables. My scripts and those written by Anurag
do not require reading the song number from the files, they
can find it from the file-name variables. To me, it is in fact
suitable to have only one source of the song #, i.e. the
file-name, otherwise in trying to read both, some conflict in
numbers at two places may just halt the operation of scripts.
But as suggested earlier, there is absolutely no harm in
keeping the file-name in the beginning of the file.
Similarly there was also not much emphasis on putting "\&"
in place of writing "and" unless you wished character "&" to
appear in the Devanagari output, the comma would also do
equally well.
\indian and \endindian changed to #indian #endindian
quite methodically in ITRANS Version 4.
The \year{} field was included by Anurag in the macro but
it is not used and not displayed in output while using standards song
format (for example, Online interface does not display year in
the output but at the same time no spelling mistake is allowed
in the \year{}). I utilise \year{} field in my scripts, as to me
it looked useful and it was present in most of the files,
(this is the reason there is no "year" or "starring" appearing
in the output of ITRANS Online Interface, but they do appear
in the combined postscript output).
I would repete it as usual, it is important to realize that
thousands of existing song files can be processed at once and
converted in to html (for displaying the text in Devanagari script
on the web, just like on Avinash's version of ISB on
http://www.aczone.com/isongs/hindi/) or postscript or many other
formats in just few seconds with ITRANS, only if the ITRANS encoding
is correctly followed and if the suggested "ITRANS Song Format" is
used without making any arbitrary modification.
devendra