2018-04-17
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Over a decade ago I needed to set some songs into nice music sheets
for our wedding ceremony.  At the time there was Lilypond[0] which
has the appeal of using scheme as it's internal language and that of
plugins but the learning curve appeared to be quite steep to me and I
was working under pressure. I have found a simpler way of entering my
music instead.

As it turns out, there is a notation standard that is easy to quickly
enter music into a computer called 'ABC notation'[1]. And there's an
accompanying program that turns this ASCII notation into postscript,
fittingly called 'abc2ps'.

This fine program has been written by Matthias Methfessel[2] and I
have found my copy of it together with the sheets in an old backup.
Unfortunately modern C compilers have been a bit too picky and it
seems there has been a bug hiding unnoticed in all these decades that
causes a segfault on my modern machines.

The abc programs seem to have originated and used in the Celtic music
community and have been popular amongst back pipers as the history
suggests[3].

I have fixed it up and will serve it here[4] for further reference.
As an example have a look at 'The rocky road to dublin'[5] in the
gallery[6].

Sorry for the earworm...

___References________________________________________________________

[0]: http://lilypond.org/
[1]: http://abcnotation.com/
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080212005024/http://www.ihp-ffo.de/~msm/
[3]: http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/doc/ABCtut_History.html
[4]: gopher://vernunftzentrum.de/1/ckeen/repos/abc2ps.git
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Road_to_Dublin
[6]: gopher://vernunftzentrum.de/1/ckeen/media/index.gph