Re: [abcusers] RE : from ABC to image

[John Walsh]

> 
> On Thu, 25 Apr 2002, Jack Campin wrote:
> 
> > On my setup (old Macs) I can generate PostScript from some applications
> > for free (I think, haven't tried lately) but creating Acrobat files
> > needs a utility that costs money.  Is there a way to do it free on any
> > current platform?
> 
> Ghostscript's ps2pdf ? Circularity alert ... !
> Also pdfTeX.
> 
> The usual free suspects, in fact.
> 
> 
> 
> I originally took up Linux because it seemed simpler than getting TeX
> running on DOS.



For completeness, I should mention that *if* you only need to
generate single staff music, and don't want to do anything too fancy with
lyrics, that abc2mtex/musixTeX creates a dvi file, and dvips or dvipdf
will create a postscript or pdf file from it, as you choose. (I haven't
tried pdftex.) Moreover, you can write a script (Linux) or batch file
(Dos/Windows) to automate the process.  And the price is right---it's all
freeware.

The dvipdf scripts are part of ghostscript; dvips is part of TeX.  
So you need TeX and Ghostscript.  But...it occurs to me that, while
installing TeX used to be something better left to a system administrator,
that was in the days when a 10 M installation was considered huge, and now
there are packages--tetex, miktex---which do the installation and
configuration work.  Maybe it's no longer quite so unthinkable. Of course,
it will never be as simple to use as abc2ps and clones--musixtex is pretty
fussy--gross understatement--but sometimes the control of the output is 
worth it.

Cheers,
John Walsh
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Re: [abcusers] RE : from ABC to image

[Richard Robinson]

On Thu, 25 Apr 2002, Jack Campin wrote:

> On my setup (old Macs) I can generate PostScript from some applications
> for free (I think, haven't tried lately) but creating Acrobat files
> needs a utility that costs money.  Is there a way to do it free on any
> current platform?

Ghostscript's ps2pdf ? Circularity alert ... !
Also pdfTeX.

The usual free suspects, in fact.



I originally took up Linux because it seemed simpler than getting TeX
running on DOS.

-- 
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem


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[abcusers] Tune Comparisons

[Richard Robinson]

The comparison of tunes is a subject that comes up from time to time. I've
been playing with it. This is most emphatically not a major software
breakthrough, believe me, but it's a start. I have compared the contents
of John's Village Music Project (whatever ABCs were available), plus some
stuff from my own Tunebook (Aird, Winder, a few other scraps).

First results are at
http://www.beulah.demon.co.uk/tunecomparisons.html


-- 
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem


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Re: [abcusers] RE : from ABC to image

[Jack Campin]

> About converting abc to eps files, or other image format, you
> should use pdf instead because most users have access to a pdf
> reader (gv, acrobat, xpdf etc.). Postcript files are not easily
> readable by windows users who don't have ghostscript (=most of
> them).

Which version of Acrobat?  They keep changing the file format, and
as it only has proprietary implementations you're more likely to get
completely stuck with unreadable files a few years down the road than
with something like PostScript where there are third-party clones.

On my setup (old Macs) I can generate PostScript from some applications
for free (I think, haven't tried lately) but creating Acrobat files
needs a utility that costs money.  Is there a way to do it free on any
current platform?

Perhaps "as well" rather than "instead"?

===  ===


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[abcusers] Modes tutorial updated

[Jack Campin]

I've uploaded a new version of the modes tutorial on my website
(see the URL below).  Let me know of any problems?


===  ===


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[abcusers] Re: parts, repeats...

[Bryancreer]

John Chambers wrote -

>Geez; there's always someone who will respond seriously to a joke!

Sorry.  You make so many comments to the effect that standards are a BAD 
THING that I didn't realise this one was meant to be a joke.  (Curious 
attitude for a member of the standards committee.)

Thanks for the serious reply even if you didn't answer my questions.

>As  for implementation,  there  is  the  general  problem  of a developer 
who
>responds "Who needs that stupid  feature?"  This  is  because  he/she
>doesn't play any of the sort of music that needs it.

and later -

>But even if we were to produce an official standard that requires endings...

No problem.  If a particular piece of software doesn't include a feature that 
it's user don't use that's no trouble to anybody.  A standard doesn't 
"require" anybody to do anything; it just says "This is how this is being 
done by other people so if you want to do it and to be able to exchange music 
with others, it would be a good idea to do it the same way."  The problem 
arises when developers introduce extensions which nobody else knows about or, 
worse still, are in direct conflict with somebody else's extension.

>The early users were mostly involved with
>British Isles music, where multiple endings are  rarely  needed,  and
>third  endings  are hardly ever seen at all.  

I'm involved with British Isles music and I'd like multiple endings.  Rarely 
isn't never.


>Jim was writing abc2win in the early days of  abc,  long  before  the
>rest of us knew what was up. Talk about a "standard" was years in the
>future.  It was an informal effort involving a handful  of  musicians
>who were also programmers. Criticising them for not doing a standards
>effort is hardly appropriate.  

So why do you do it?  I seem to recall remarks like "gross violations of the 
standard" and "deviant" with reference to abc2win.  I'm not criticising the 
early developers; it's the curernt situation that worries me.  We ARE now 
years in the future.  ABC has moved on and now involves hundreds if not 
thousands of people across several continents (Well, we get junk mail from 
Turkey).  We can't all get together in the pub for a friendly chat.

ABC is all right.  With a bit more cooperation between the developers it 
could be bloody fantatstic.

Bryan Creer

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[abcusers] RE : from ABC to image

[Forgeot Eric]

>Is there any tool to convert abc document into an image? I was
using
>abcm2ps, but when music is too big, it generates two images.


Hi,

I've seen your website. 2 remarks :

1/ About converting abc to eps files, or other image format, you
should use pdf instead because most users have access to a pdf
reader (gv, acrobat, xpdf etc.). Postcript files are not easily
readable by windows users who don't have ghostscript (=most of
them).
If most of your tunes are not too much big, you can try to change
the size of the abcm2ps output with this :
ABCM2PS3-0-1.EXE abc_temp.abc -F fileformat 

with a file named : fileformat.fmt like that :

%  parameters for typesetting music
   scale 0.65
% you can even use a smaller factor
   continueall
   maxshrink 0.90
   staffsep 30pt

etc.

It could fit on just one page.

You can try also to add commands inside the abc file

%%staffsep 49pt
%%sysstaffsep 27pt

That's what I do when I get a staff alone on a third page etc.

2/ It would be useful to have in addition on you site a zipped
file with all the abc in it... for offline.




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[abcusers] Herkesin istedigi...

[musicguy]

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Re: [abcusers] jazz-songbook in abcformat

[John Chambers]

| > "John" == John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
|
| John> The "don't tell anybody" is accurate.  Your clique will want to  keep
| John> its  URLs  a  secret.   This  is mostly to keep the search sites from
| John> finding your stuff and advertising it to the world.
|
| There's something else you want to do for that, and that's to tell the
| robots not to index it if they do stumble on it.  You do this by
| putting in the header a tag that says:
|
| 
|
| (or noindex, nofollow).  I assume this doesn't protect against spam
| harvesters, but does result in your pages not being indexed by google.

Yeah; I probably oughta add a comment about that.  It  won't  protect
you  from  the spammers; it's a strictly voluntary HTML feature.  But
the search engines do generally honor such things.  It's widely  used
to  block  indexing of parts of the web that are rapidly changing, or
contain things like large binary files that will be a waste  of  time
for  the  search  sites.  I learned early on that the big search guys
don't do much useful with abc,  so  I  have  HEADER.html  files  that
include  this  line.   I let them search my docs and such, but it's a
waste of everyone's time for them to search directories full of abc.

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Re: [abcusers] jazz-songbook in abcformat

[Laura Conrad]

> "John" == John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

John> The "don't tell anybody" is accurate.  Your clique will want to  keep
John> its  URLs  a  secret.   This  is mostly to keep the search sites from
John> finding your stuff and advertising it to the world.

There's something else you want to do for that, and that's to tell the
robots not to index it if they do stumble on it.  You do this by
putting in the header a tag that says:



(or noindex, nofollow).  I assume this doesn't protect against spam
harvesters, but does result in your pages not being indexed by google.

-- 
Laura (mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] , http://www.laymusic.org/ )
(617) 661-8097  fax: (801) 365-6574 
233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139

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Re: [abcusers] jazz-songbook in abcformat

[John Chambers]

Atte writes:
| On Wed, 24 Apr 2002, John Chambers wrote:
| > Do you know how to make "hidden" web pages? I checked, and found that
| > home.wanadoo.nl  is a unix machine running apache.  On such a server,
| > it's really easy to put things on the web so  that  only  people  who
| > know the URL can find them.  Some studies have concluded that between
| > 40% and 50% of the web is hidden in this way, visible only to members
| > of an inside group.
| >
| > If you don't know how to do it, I could explain it.
|
| Please to, but can I have a guess? 1) don't put metatags out for the
| search engines and 2) don't tell anybody...

Nah; nothing so sophisticated.  I wrote a doc on the subject:
  http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/doc/HiddenWeb.html

This was in response to a big study which concluded that around  half
the  online pages were "hidden" simply by being inaccessible from the
"public" collection of web pages. I was surprised to learn that a lot
of  people  didn't  know  about  this, or thought there was something
underhanded about it.  So I wrote up a little doc on how to do it.

And note that there's nothing tricky or suspicious here; it's part of
the intentional design of web servers. There are many reasons someone
might want web pages to be hidden.  For example, you are working on a
web  site, and don't want to "release" it to the general public.  But
you want to test it from web browsers to make  sure  that  everything
works.   So  you "hide" it during development.  Then you add a single
link from a public page to release it to the Web.

The "don't tell anybody" is accurate.  Your clique will want to  keep
its  URLs  a  secret.   This  is mostly to keep the search sites from
finding your stuff and advertising it to the world.

| > What you should do is pass the word among other jazz  musicians,  and
| > get  them  thinking  about  an online fake book that's available from
| > anywhere there's a machine with a web browser. If you can get a small
| > group  of them contributing tunes, you can have a full fake book in a
| > short time.  It sounds like a worthwhile project to me.
|
| Actually I tried that, most peoples excuse is how complex (?) abc seems to
| be. "All these codes". And I must admit that I should really sit down and
| make a clear, working explanation on how to seup abc under windows. I get
| exhausted just thinking about it :-)

I've found that it helps  to  have  a  few  good  examples  that  are
formatted with lots of white space for readability, and don't use too
many of the more sophisticated abc features. Then I just show the abc
to people, and show how easy it is to read. This gets across the idea
that it's basically really simple, and they can do it.

Work up a few examples that use only the  two  octaves,  CDEFGAB  and
cdefgab,  simple  bar  lines and repeats, and of course chords (since
this is jazz).  Use only the X, T, C, M, L and K header lines.  Maybe
throw  in a few D lines.  Arrange the music to show phrasing clearly.
Print out a few copies to carry around.  You should be able to  teach
it to someone in a few minutes. They'll start using abc for their own
hand-scribbled tunes.  Try emailing them a few tunes, and  point  out
that they don't need any new abc software to read it, just their mail
reader.

The main problem is people who think you need complicated  GUI  tools
to  do  anything  on a computer.  Yeah; that's difficult.  But abc is
plain text.  You can write it with a pencil.  Typing tunes is  pretty
easy.   A  computer keyboard isn't as good as a musical keyboard, but
it's not all that bad.


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