[Menvi-discuss] text-based music systems

[Marc Sabatella]

BTW, for anyone interested in checking out ABC, I do think EasyABC is 
the way to go as far as tools go, with one caveat.  If you install it 
from the link I provided earlier, everything is set up for you except 
for "ghostscript", which you need to install separately in order to get 
PDF export of scores.  And I guess it has to be in your PATH or 
something, because although I have it installed, EasyABC cannot find it. 
Hopefully there are setup instructions on the EasyABC site.

I say EasyABC seems to "mostly" work with keyboard control and 
screenreaders, but it's not necessarily obvious how.  I imagine that's 
true of a lot of programs - it helps to know what is going on.  So 
here's some things to know to get started.

When you fire up EasyABC, your cursor is in an edit pane where you can 
start typing ABC.  An ABC file has to start with an "X" and a "K" field, 
so first thing you probably want to do is type:

X:1
K:C

(or whatever key you want instead of C).  Then you can type the actual 
music.  As you type, the results are automatically fed to abcm2ps and 
converted to standard notation which is displayed in another pane.  
There is a third pane that contains a list of your open files, and of 
the tunes defined in each (ABC lets you define multiple tunes per 
file).  But if there is a way to transfer focus to either of those other 
pane, I haven't found it.  I think you can do what you might need 
without that, though.

Pressing F6 will play the current score.  It's being rendered in 
standard notation as you type in a separate window, using the abcm2ps 
program I mentioned, but you don't need to know that. Everything else is 
accessed through menus.

When you want to generate a PDF of your score, it would in theory be as 
simple as as File / Export Selected / PDF (which exports the current 
file), but as mentioned this only works if you've previously installed 
and configured ghostscript.  Also, EasyABC has some automatic typing 
assistance turned on that silently inserts barlines (the editor is at 
least partially language-aware) and does other things you probably don't 
really want.  I would start by going to Settings / ABC typing assistance 
/ Active and making sure it is turned off.  This setting is remembered, 
so you only need to do it once.

Marc