About

About the Tune Books

These tune books were created using ABC musical notation and a combination of several open source software packages.

ABC Music Notation

The first thing I do is create each tune in ABC musical notation format. ABC format is plain ASCII text where each note is represented by a letter of the alphabet from A to G, followed by a numeric value representing the note's duration. Since ABC uses plain ASCII text, any text editor like Notepad for Windows or vi for Unix can be used. I save each tune as a separate file. You can find out more about ABC music notation by visiting Chris Walshaw's ABC Home Page.

ABC Pre-processor

The next thing I do is create a single ABC file from the ABC tune files previously created. For this I use the ABC Pre-processor Program (abcpp) by Guido Gonzato. This program reads a text file of pre-processor commands and creates a single ABC file as it's output.

Convert to Postscript

Once I have a single ABC file to work with, I use a program written by Jean-Francois Moine called abcm2ps. This program converts the ABC file to standard sheet music notation in Postscript format.

Convert to PDF

For the final step I use Ghostscript to convert the Postscript file to Adobe PDF format. This PDF file can be viewed and printed by anyone who has the Adobe Reader software installed.