ABC
ABC is a fairly popular choice for text edited music notations, originally created by Chris Walshaw. Now quite a lot of software evolves around this notation, most of them adding bells and whistles on top of original ABC standard, because (as ABC Plus project has pointed out) ABC is originally for simple melodies only, and incapable of handling complex music structure. However these additions are done in an uncommunicated matter, causing incompatibilities among themselves. An effort to unite all these extras is ongoing.
In ScoreRender, abcm2ps (written by Jean-François Moine) is specifically picked among others, because of its capability to render polyphonic music. You can download source code on abcm2ps official website and binaries on ABC Plus website.
Usage
Enclose ABC fragment with [abc] and [/abc] pair.
Official Documentation
The full text of ABC standard itself is on Sourceforge ABC Project website.
There is no complete reference covering all extensions used by abcm2ps yet.
Other external documentation
(This is by no mean complete, resource about ABC tutorial and software is comparatively much richer than any other notation)
- An ABC primer: a simple introduction to ABC notation, by John Chambers.
- ABC music notation tutorial (part 1, part 2), by Steve Mansfield.
- Making Music with ABC Plus: Guido Gonzato has written a manual on ABC Plus, which focus on using
abcm2ps. - A collection of ABC music, compiled by Chris Walshaw.
- Some other resource links available on ABC Project website.
- Another collection of resources on ABC, by Gordon J. Callon
- Entry of ABC notation on Wikipedia
Getting started
TODO.
