In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Laura Conrad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I think I've learned to use abc2ps pretty well, but I don't use it for
> mixing text and music
I agree that abc2ps isn't the greatest word processor in existence. If
I want to get fancy I use it together with TeX. In fact it is quite
possible to generate PDF from abc2ps' EPS output and use pdf(La)TeX to
prepare big PDF files to publish on the net or send to the print shop.
(My dance book is an example of this.)
> , and I've never figured out how to put the date
> of printing on the page, and I don't know how to do an incipit in a
> smaller music font size. (If there were syntax for the clefs I needed
> in an incipit.)
If I were to do incipits for a book I would probably write a Perl
script to extract the relevant bits of music and run them through
abc2ps separately, for later processing with LaTeX. Not nice, but
workable.
I use �pure� abc2ps to print my Scottish country dance arrangements,
four tunes on two pages using John Chambers' approach of a �T:� line
giving the name of the dance and �P:� lines for the tune names, and
what I would really like to see is a feature to repeat the first title
line (the dance name) in, say, the footer, together with a page number,
like
+--------------------------+--------------------------+
| The Sailor | Qumdaro Trad. |
| RSCDS XIV | ............... |
| | |
| The Davy Hornpipe Trad. | Lord Saltoun Trad. |
| ........... | ............... |
| | |
| The Forecastle Trad. | |
| ........... | |
| | |
| The Sailor - 1 | The Sailor - 2 |
+--------------------------+--------------------------+
Time to rev up the C compiler and get out the PostScript manual, maybe
...
As an aside, I'd be the first person to agree that abc2ps is not the
be-all and end-all of music typesetting, but for the things I do --
simple arrangements of Scottish dance music -- it certainly runs rings
around everything else I know that is given away for free and most of
the commercial competition, too. A while ago I had a friend to stay
who was a hard-core enthusiast of one of the big Mac-based music
editing packages (I forget which). It was fun to watch her see my
little PC zoom through 180 or so files (more than 300 pages' worth of
music) in about half a minute, typesetting music and generating four
different types of index along the way ... As far as output quality is
concerned, there are books of SCD music being sold now whose
typesetting is so abominable that looking at them almost hurts, and
even some stuff by people who ought to know better makes it difficult
to tell exactly to which stem the flag is attached in a
strathspey. Give me abc2ps any day.
Anselm
--
Anselm Lingnau ......................... [EMAIL PROTECTED]
C++ has a really wonderful track record for compilers that disagree with each
other and their own documentation, and that crash in interesting ways.
-- Richard A. O'Keefe
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