Other utilities

abc

Although abctab2ps supports some command line options for the selection of voices or tunes for output, it is often desirable to write such selections into another abc file. This is achieved with abcselect, which is also available from the abctab2ps homepage abcselect is a platform independent Perl script.

A graphical editor for abc files with syntax highlighting and automatic invocation of abctab2ps and other third party software (like ghostview) is available as flabc from the abctab2ps homepage.

If you do not like to edit plain text files for the abc input but prefer some GUI stuff, you can try Jean F. Moine's tclabc. As it based upon Tcl/Tk, it runs on almost every platform. However, tclabc only supports music, no tablature.

Postscript

As abctab2ps produces postscript output, you also need some tools for processing postscript files (ok, you do not need them necessarily if you have a postscript printer, but even then some of the following tools are useful). If you run Linux, all of these tools should already be installed on your system; on other operating systems you possibly need to download, build and install them yourself.

In order to print postscript files on a non postscript printer, you need ghostscript. Ghostcript can not only convert postscript into almost all printer languages, it even can produce output formats which may be viewed on the screen. This capability is utilised by the online previewers ghostview and gv (same as ghostview, but more polished GUI).

There is a number of PS-utilities for manipulating postscript files. Useful are psselect (for extracting particular pages, e.g. all odd or even pages or pages 1 to 7), psresize (e.g. for converting EU A4 to US letter and vice versa) and psbook (reorders pages for book printing).

WYSIWIG text processors generally do not allow direct import of plain postscript files. In order to display the image in their editor window, they need a particular version of encapsulated postscript named EPSI. EPSI contains a (low quality) bitmap used by the text processor for its online preview; on printing the original (high quality) postscript is used. The tool ps2epsi converts postscript to EPSI.