♩ ScoreRender ♫

PMW stands for Philip’s Music Writer, written by Philip Hazel.

Usage

Enclose PMW fragment with [pmw] and [/pmw] pair.

Official Documentation

Though online documentation is scarce, the reference document inside source code package is fairly complete. (A copy of PDF is stored on this site.) There are a few examples available on official PMW site as well.

Other external documentation

None discovered yet.

Getting started

As a starter, let’s take a look at the three-blind-mice rhythm again as used in other tutorials:

[pmw]
time C

[stave 1 treble 1]
e d C | @1
[endstave]
[/pmw]

PMW score is divided into header section and stave sections: header section contain info about the score itself, like sheet dimension, time, key etc., though there is no clear identifier labelling header section. Staves section are enclosed like:

[stave 1 ...]
......
[endstave]

[stave 2 ...]
......
[endstave]

......

• Use ‘time‘ keyword for time signature: C means common time. (default is 4/4)
• “[stave 1 treble 1]“: each stave is actually a voice, which means we can combine 2 or more voices into a single stave. “treble” means using treble clef. The final “1″ is a bit unobvious: it means using middle C as the basis when specifying octaves (though not useful here in such simplistic example).
• PMW is a bit different from other notations on specifying note lengths. Lower case letters denote crotchet, and upper case letters denote minim.
• Each vertical bar denotes a simple barline.
• The final “@1″ is not a mandatory bar count; the “@” sign is simply a comment, anything after “@” is ignored. The “@1″ is just a practise to remind people how many bars have been typesetted.
• After finishing a voice or stave, append “[endstave]” to it.

View some more examples in action.