/abctab2ps

music and tablature typesetting program

Primary LanguageC++OtherNOASSERTION

abctab2ps

abctab2ps is a music and tablature typesetting program which translates an input file in the abc language into postscript. It is based on Michael Methfessel's program abc2ps. While abc2ps can only typeset music, abctab2ps is an extension that can also handle lute tablature.

Installation from source

Prerequisites:

  • C++98 compiler. Compilation has been tested with clang on MacOS X, gcc on Linux, and MingW on Windows
  • GNU make

To compile abctab2ps from the source code package, change to the subdirectory src and type make. To install it on Linux, type ($ is the shell prompt):

$ sudo make install

If you install the abctab2ps fonts in some other directory than /usr/share/abctab2ps or /usr/local/share/abctab2ps, you must set the environment variable ABCTABFONTS to the full path of the directory containing the tablature font files.

If you ever need to uninstall abctab2ps, type sudo make uninstall. Alternatively, you can use the ESP Package Manager epm (see https://www.msweet.org/epm/), to create a RPM or DEB package and install it (replace "platform" with your processor type and "x.y.z" with the current version of abctab2ps):

$ # on rpm based systems like Red Hat or Suse:
$ make rpm
$ sudo rpm -i linux-platform/abctab2ps-x.y.z.rpm

$ # on deb based systems like Debian or Ubuntu:
$ sudo make deb
$ sudo dpkg -i linux-platform/abctab2ps-x.y.z.rpm

Note that abctab2ps will create a postscript file. This means that you will additionally need a postscript interpreter like ghostscript to convert the PS file to PDF or to view it directly.

Binary packages

File releases and precompiled binary installers for different platforms are available from http://www.lautengesellschaft.de/cdmm/.

Usage and Documentation

In order to create a music/tablature score you must perform the following steps:

  1. Start an editor, enter the music in abc language and save it under a filename with the extension ".abc", eg. "bla.abc".

  2. Switch to the command line and call abctab2ps on that file, eg. abctab2ps bla.abc. This will create the score as postscript graphics in the file "Out.ps".

You will find the necessary documentation for both steps in the subdirectory doc:

  1. The User's Guide in the subdirectory doc/userguide describes the abc language and is essential for step 1. There is both a PDF and a HTML version.

  2. The manual page in the subdirectory doc/manpages describes the invocation of abctab2ps and all command line parameters. It is essential for step 2. There is both a html version and a nroff version (for online reference with "man"). If you run Unix and the installation with "make install" was successful, you should be able to read the man page with man abctab2ps.

  3. Some illustrative examples are in the subdirectory doc/examples.

Copyright and author

Copyright (c) 1999-2022 by Christoph Dalitz

Official home page of abctab2ps and the integrated editior flabc: http://www.lautengesellschaft.de/cdmm/

For licensing information, see the file LICENSE for details.