[ In 000928 MMDigest Julie Porter wrote about using PostScript
 [ programming language for a music roll reader.  Mickey Sadler
 [ wrote in 981120 MMDigest about the ABC2PS music notation system,
 [ a language designed to notate tunes in an ASCII format, and the
 [ possibility of using it for music rolls.  -- Robbie

The available ABC software has grown and the existing software continues
to get better.  The free software (under GNU GPL) is written in C and
PostScript.  The PostScript code draws the music (staves, notes, guitar
chords, tab, etc.) on the paper.

There is no reason the code in the PostScript sections that describes
and generates the note symbols could not instead generate a punch
(hole) symbol and print it in the proper note track on a page.  The
"words" function could also put the words on the page in the proper
place since abc2ps (or abcm2ps or YAPS or...) aligns the lyrics with
the notes.

ABC has recently become a SourceForge project; for anyone interested
in developing ABC music programs see

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/abc/   and
  http://abc.sourceforge.net/   (project home page).

Take a look at the ABC music home page, the standard V1.6 and the draft
revised standard 1.7.6 for more information.

I have been tinkering with this some, but I don't get much time to work
with it and my experience with C and PostScript is very little so I have
not made much headway.

Later,

Mickey E. Sadler, Dublin, Ohio