I'd second that vote for abcm2ps, much nicer V: handling and a few other tweaks. I also got mine through sourceforge, just follow the abcm2ps links.oh, you should probably use Abcm2ps, it's newer and better than the old abc2ps. Binaries and helps can be found on Guido Gonzato's website. I don't have the url here you can find it with www.google.com and probably also at : http://abcplus.sourceforge.net/
So you've got your abcm2ps Windows executable - but I suspect that what you do *next* is also causing you some doubt.
It's worth pointing out straight away abc2ps and abcm2ps aren't combined editors and viewers like abc2Win: they are processors, eg they take existing abc files and (amongst other fab things) produces Postscript output of conventional notation.
This is a bit of a long process to set up, but you'll only need to do this the once, and the results are well worth the effort!
So, first write your abc file in your text editor of preference (I use TextPad www.textpad.com, but NotePad will do the job OK-ish) and save your file with an .abc extension (minding, as you do, NotePad's irritating propensity to save files as filename.abc.txt unless you use the All Files option in Save).
Now you want to feed that file to abcm2ps - best way to do this regularly is through a batch file. The line in my batch file is
c:\progra~1\abc2ps\abcm2ps %1 -O d:\temp\Out.ps >> d:\temp\abc2psLog.txt
(That is all one line despite any email wrapping).
where
c:\progra~1\abc2ps\abcm2ps
is where the abcm2ps executable resides,
%1
is the batch file parameter which is set to the abc file at runtime,
-O
outputs a PostScript file,
d:\temp\Out.ps
is the PostScript file which is created,
and
>> d:\temp\abc2psLog.txt
captures the abcm2ps messages to a log file in my temp directory.
[You can do all sorts of stuff like only choosing certain tunes from the file, or sending very precise layout options, or produce an index, check the many options for details. To do that just type
abcm2ps
at the command line in the relevant directory and have a good read.]
OK, so now you've got your Postscript file. If your printer speaks PostScript, and you're only ever going to want to print stuff out to paper, print that Postscript file and you're done.
If, however, you'd like to see the results on-screen (like you can in Abc2Win) before they print, or just want to see the tunes on-screen and save a forest, and have various other control over the printout, you need GhostScript (a GPL implementation of Postscript) and GsView, two (linked) programs that you can get from various magazine cover disks or a quick search on Google should give you a URL.
Install Ghostscript and GSView (The graphical interface) and add another line to your batch file, feeding the .ps file to GSView - mine is
c:\gstools\gsview\gsview32.exe d:\temp\Out.ps
then when you run your batch file against your abc file, your abc will be converted into PostScript and displayed on-screen for proof-reading or printing (you can print from GSView).
One of the reasons I use Textpad for all my text-file work is that TextPad allows you to set up macros to external programs. I've got Macro 1 set up so that the file currently on-screen is fed to my abcm2ps batch file, so all I have to do to process the file in abcm2ps and display the results in GSView is hit <ctl><1>. Other Windows text editors allow similar functionality of course.
Good luck, hope this helps!
Oh one final thing - GhostScript and GSView, in my experience, get very upset and fail to work properly if you don't install them in the default c:\gstools directory, so just go with that if I were you ...
--
Steve Mansfield
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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