Third time’s a charm. Similar to my other Scahill Tune-a-Day compilations, I am using ABC music notation as part of abcjs (a ABC rendering library) to make an online catalog of music, eventually to be published as a PDF version
How is this different from the last two editions?
This was straightforward but not automated. First, copy. Then, I had to pick a new highlight color (red!), locate a snippet of music I wanted as a tagline (from a reel this time: Miss Cassidy's), and then delete the former content while maintaining the style.
Like I said before, if you plan to extensively use the search function on The Session, considering sponsoring.
First, I got the latest abcm2ps source, configured, and installed. The default output is Postscript, one song per page. Fortunately, the ABC guide by Guido Gonzato describes a process for cropping and combining tune pages. This means a good automation script was needed.
When I realized that a list of filenames could be provided to abcm2ps and this would be output with multiple tunes per page (even with identical reference numbers in the header field, ‘X:’), a Bash script was prepared to select filenames, identify missing prerequisite programs, and tweak various visual parameters of the output document.
This tool is scripts/convert-abc23-with-abcm2ps.sh
This was really an exercise in learning how Postscript works. It was obvious from an early point how time-consuming it would be to add an encapsulated postscript written by hand, but I also wanted to know how each glyph was being generated and even manually wrote a sharp glyph.