Welcome to the PC distribution of abc2mtex To run abc2mtex on a PC you will need TeX, MusicTeX, and access to a postscript printer. The TeX package for PCs (emTeX) can be obtained from CTAN or from the TeX Users Group, TUG, on floppy disk (see below). MusicTeX (or MusiXTeX) can be also be obtained from CTAN or from its creator Daniel Taupin on one 1.2Mbyte disk. Alternatively, Alan Ng has stripped everything you need from TeX and MusicTeX and put them in one package, abcwin, available from the Ceolas archive (see below) and this is a much less painful way of getting everything set up. Even more alternatively you could try another software tool ABC2Win (see the abc home page) which doesn't require the use of TeX and MusicTeX. You may still want to get abc2mtex for the indexing and searching facilities though. INSTALLATION ============ abc2mtex ======== Download the file abc2mtex.zip then type: unzip abc2mtex.zip (or possibly pkunzip abc2mtex.zip). I have compiled the code using a Borland C++ 3.1 compiler and the three executable files, abc2mtex.exe, sort_in.exe & search.exe, come with the distribution. To compile by hand (for example, to use a different C compiler) enter cc -o abc2mtex fields.c abc.c tex.c index.c cc -o sort_in sort_in.c index.c cc -o search search.c abc.c tex.c index.c Most things should work as described in the documentation, although you will not be able to use the 'make' command and I believe that DOS will not interpret *.abc as "all files with a .abc extension" when it is used as command line input to the program. A PostScript version of the usrguide is included in the distribution, but you can recompile it by running "latex usrguide.tex" twice (you will need MusicTeX installed to do this). TeX & MusicTeX ============== Probably the easiest way to install these large typesetting packages is to get hold of Alan Ng's abcwin (mentioned above) from Ceolas. Addresses ========= If you have a WWW browser you can find CTAN at ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive ftp://ftp.shsu.edu/tex-archive ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive From there MusicTeX is in "macros/musictex", MusiXTeX is in "macros/musixtex", emTeX is in "systems/msdos/emtex" and abc2mtex is in "support/abc2mtex". abc2mtex, abcwin and related files can also be found at the Ceolas archive in http://celtic.stanford.edu/pub/tunes The abc home page, with a list of all abc packages (including translators for abc->PostScript, abc<->MIDI and abc->Windows95), lists of web accessible collections of abc tunes, and the web wide abc index can be found at http://www.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc If you have ftp access then just use the addresses above (e.g. to use anonymous ftp to "ftp://a.b.c/x/y/z" (or "http://a.b.c/x/y/z" in most cases), type "ftp a.b.c", enter "anonymous" at the login prompt, your email address at the password prompt, and then "cd /x/y/z"). To get some of these on floppy disk contact: TeX Users Group, P.O. Box 869, Santa Barbara, CA 93102, USA. (email TUG@TUG.org) Chris Walshaw C.Walshaw@gre.ac.uk