ABC2NW is a program I wrote for converting files from the ever-popular ABC format to a format printable by the program Noteworthy, available from Braeburn Software. Noteworthy is a music typesetting program available for DOS and, under the name Music Publisher, for Windows '95. It doesn't accept input from MIDI or other standard music formats but instead is meant to be flexible enough to produce any and every kind of printable music. And since there are few quick and easy programs to print ABC music (which looks like a jumble of numbers, letters and symbols in its raw form), I wrote one.

To download ABC2NW (version 1.3 but no updates are planned), click here. To view the files it creates you do need to download Noteworthy (follow the link to Braeburn Software above).

Technical information on the Noteworthy file format is available here on Braeburn Software's website. This file is what I used to write ABC2NW.

ABC2NW currently supports:

• All notes and accidentals.
• Special symbols for staccato, trill, and violin bowing.
• Between-measure tying (with the dash symbol) and tying notes together with parenthesis.
• First and second repeats.
• Automatic beaming of notes.
• All major and minor keys. The "bagpipe" key signatures of HP and Hp are supported along with what they produce music-wise (stems always point down, etc).
• Grace notes, including little accidental symbols if necessary.
• Chords.
• All bars and repeat symbols, except [| which isn't supported by Noteworthy and will be translated to ||.
• Tuplets of any size with the number automatically centered above or below it.
• The program does a (surprisingly) good job of justifying the notes so they all fit on the staff, expanding or squishing them as necessary. It is also very careful about not over-stretching the last staff, which usually has less music on it than the rest.
• Guitar chords printed above the staff (or any other letters or numbers in quotation marks).
• All clefs; this is an extension to ABC and is unsupported by the current standard notation. Treble, bass, alto and tenor are all supported insomuch as the music is transposed automatically and the different clef symbols are used.
• Modes correctly modify the key signature and are all supported: Locrian, phrygian, aeolian, dorian, mixolydian, iolian, lydian.
• Broken rhythms, as in: A>B G<B
• A tempo key will be printed on the top-left side of the page or, if it is changed in the middle of a song, over the staff where it is changed. It can use any note length including dotted notes.
• The title of the song will be put at the top of the page along with up to two optional subtitles.
• The composer, origin, and rhythm will be printed appropriately in the top-right corner of the page.
• Upper- and lower-case accented vowels can be used freely in the title according to three different standards. (This is an extension over standard ABC code.) Only supports acute accents: á Á

Here are some other resources for finding and printing music off the Internet: