Abc is a code for typesetting music invented by Chris Walshaw. Music is coded using ascii characters. For example, the notes in the sample above were entered as
d/c/ | B2E E>FE |where the letters specify pitches, "/" halves the note duration, "2" doubles the duration, and "|" makes a bar line. A major advantage of abc is that it can be used to distribute music over the internet, since no special characters are used and the format is independent of specific implementations. Some very good collections of music (especially folk music) can be found on the net, for example via the links below.
Abc2ps is a typesetting program for abc. It reads a file containing abc code and outputs the music to another file in Postscript. The music can then displayed (i.e. using ghostview) or printed on a Postscript printer. The program is written in C and runs on most systems which have a C compiler. An executable for ms-dos is also available. For a trial version which can generate audio output, look in subdirectory new in the source directory.
Related links:
XBS is a simple but very useful program for plotting ball-and-sticks models of molecules or crystals under the X Window system. By displaying successive "frames" a kind of movie can be shown. The program can write Postscript output files. A nice feature (in my view) is that xbs is controlled by keystrokes and not by mousing and clicking. To run xbs, a reasonably recent X Window release (X11R5, probably) is needed, but Motif is not required.
The xbs program is available as a compressed tar file here. A list of recent changes to the program is also available.
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Michael Methfessel (methfessel@ihp-ffo.de)
