Special Characters in Text Strings

The abc language uses the standard ASCII character set, which is all that
is required for recording the music itself. However, the notator may want
to record a title or composer written in a language which uses characters
outside the standard ASCII set. There is support for a good range of
special characters in the abc specification by means of mnemonics,
named html entities and fixed width unicode. Also, toadflax supports utf-8,
which allows the encoding of unicode characters within a byte stream, but
the ordinary ASCII characters are still recognized as normal. The unicode
specification covers all the characters that you are likely to require
in normal circumstances.

However, sometimes you may encounter abc files where some other way of
encoding special characters into a byte stream has been used. Fortunately
there is a utility called iconv which is able to convert such files to
utf-8. For example, the following command will convert a file from using
a particular version of ISO-8859 to utf-8.

iconv -f ISO-8859-15 -t UTF-8 < original_tune.abc > new_tune_utf8.abc

Theiconv utility is available in Linux. I have not investigated if it is also
available on other operating systems.