"Abc is a language designed to notate tunes in an ascii format. It was designed primarily for folk and traditional tunes of Western European origin (such as Irish, English and Scottish) which can be written on one stave in standard classical notation. One of the most important aims of abc notation, and perhaps one that distinguishes it from most, if not all, computer-readable musical languages is that it can be easily read by humans. In other words, with a little practice, it is possible to play a tune directly from the abc notation without having to process and print it out. Even if this isn't of interest, the resulting clarity of the notation makes it fairly easy to notate tunes. In addition, the ability to write music in abc notation means that it can be easily and portably stored or transported electronically." - Chris Walshaw (originator of abc) from The abc Homepage
"Abc2ps is a typesetting program for abc. It reads a file containing abc code and outputs the music to another file in postscript. The music can then displayed (i.e. using ghostview) or printed on a Postscript printer. The program is written in C and runs on most systems which have a C compiler. " - Michael Methfessel (author of abc2ps) from Michael Methfessel's home page
"abcb2ps is a variant of abc2ps that typesets the notation in the style typically used for bagpipe music." - Eric M. Mrozek (author of abcb2ps)
"abcm2ps implements ... multiple voices on multiple staves ... plus automatic clef change and automatic staff change." - Jean-François Moine (author of abcm2ps) in an email
"Jaabc2ps is [an] adaptation of the scoring program "abcm2ps." Like the original, it converts abc music notation into postscript files containing scalable graphics of sheet music. [New features include improved symbol spacing, text positioning, and watermarking, and implementations of some of the draft 1.7.3 standard abc syntax]." - John Atchley (author of jaabc2ps) in an email
"YAPS is Yet Another abc to PostScript converter. [...] YAPS uses the library of PostScript routines from abc2ps, but [...] uses the abc2midi parsing code, so hopefully compatibility with abc2midi will be good." - James Allwright (author of yaps) from The abcMIDI Page
"abc2pdf is a Win95/98/NT DOS script that uses one of the abc2ps variants and ghostscript so that you can get pdf output in one step." - Eric M. Mrozek (author of abc2pdf)
A useful and free alternative is to use GSView
with ghostscript.
Ghostscript includes a ps2pdf conversion script. In ghostscript_5.50 I had to change the appropriate
line in ps2pdf.bat to refer to the "console mode" executable
set PS2PDFGS=gswin32c
You also need to change another line in ps2pdf.bat to point to the
correct location of the fonts, something like
set PS2PDFOPT=-Ic:\gstools\gs5.10;c:\gstools\gs5.10\fonts
or alternatively set the environment variable in autoexec.bat to something like
set GS_LIB=c:\gstools\gs5.10;c:\gstools\gs5.10\fonts
I have written a Win95/98/NT DOS script called abc2pdf.bat (3k) which runs abc2ps (including any command-line options you specify) to create the postscript output, then runs ghostscript to convert the ps file to a pdf file, then deletes the ps file. Pretty simple. Run it without any arguements to see "help" information. Comments inside the batch file describe how to use the Adobe Acrobat Distiller tool instead of ghostscript.
Note: You need to have abc2ps and ghostscript installed and the binaries have to be in the search path. I use Acrobat Distiller myself, so I have no plans to wrap this up with a GUI.
If you write a similar script for other platforms, I'm willing to post it here:
cd/<e/) have the extra beam for the short note pointed left instead of right.
c>de<f structure to tell the software which direction
to point the extra flags for the shorter notes, but it's still not a simple change.
Last Update: 27 April 2003
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