abcm2ps

Overview

abcm2ps is a C program which converts music tunes from the ABC music notation to PostScript or SVG.

Based on abc2ps, the Postscript generator for ABC music notation by Michael Methfessel, abcm2ps was first developped to print barock organ scores that have independant voices played on one or many keyboards and a pedal-board (the 'm' of abcm2ps stands for many or multi staves/voices). Since this time, it has evolved so it can render many more music types.

Note that this program is at end of life. Its successor is abc2svg.

Features

The features of abcm2ps are based on the ABC draft 2.2 (February 2013). The differences are listed in the abcm2ps/abc2svg documentation.

Installation and usage

The installation procedure is described in the file INSTALL. To build the program with default settings run

    ./configure
    make

Basically, the program usage is:

abcm2ps [options] file1 [file1_options] file2 [file2_options] ...

where file1, file2, .. are the ABC input files. This generates a Postscript file (default name: Out.ps).

Run abcm2ps -h to know the list of the command line options.

Documentation

• The file abcm2ps.rst describes all command-line options.

When abcm2ps is installed, this file may be displayed by man abcm2ps.

• The features and format parameters are described in abcm2ps-doc.

Links

Author's page: http://moinejf.free.fr/

To know more about the ABC music notation, have a look at abcnotation.

Guido Gonzato maintains many abcm2ps binaries and more documentation at abcplus.