James Allwright - 2020-10-12

Toadflax : User Guide

Once you have a compiled version of Toadflax, it is intended to run
as a GTK application. This gives it a look and feel which may be
familiar from other GTK applications.

If you do not have a graphical way to start up Toadflax, it can be
started from the command line using a terminal such as xterm :

./toadflax

For this to work, you must have a windowing system which supports GTK
active (such as X windows on Linux).

On startup, Toadflax brings up a file choosing menu for you to select
your abc file (which must be a file with extension .abc)

There are many ways in which abc notation is used. Commonly, it is
used to create collections of tunes, with each tune being self-contained,
so that it can be copied out of the collection to another file with
no problems. The abc standard 2.2 describes these as abc tunebooks.
However, the abc standard 2.2 also supports a number of
global fields (described as a file header) which apply to all tunes
in a file. Fortunately there are only a few of these and they provide
convenience shortcuts rather than essential features, except for
some commands that control the precise form of printed output. The abc
standard 2.2 recommends that abc tunebooks do not use file headers.
Toadflax assumes it is working on an abc tunebook, treats each tune
as being independent, and so ignores any global file header information.

Having opened your abc tunebook, your are presented with a new window
in which a list of all the available tunes are shown, together with
their reference number (from the X: field), the time signature, title
and key signature. Also at the top of this window are drop-down menus
to allow you to select magnification (small/normal/large/extra large),
Edit mode or View mode and a button to allow you to save any changes
when you are finished.

Double clicking on one of the tunes in this window brings up a new
window. In View mode, this window just contains the tune, but in
Edit mode, the window is more complex. In Edit mode, the top part
of the window contains an editable pane with the abc text in. Below
this are 4 buttons :

  1. Transformations - giving you access to abc2abc.
  2. Discard All Changes - causing the edit pane to revert to original text.
  3. Keep Changes and Exit - internally stores the changes you have made to
    a tune.
  4. See Errors/No Errors - clicking on this button shows any errors or
    warnings encountered in rendering the abc tune. If no errors were found,
    this is labelled "No errors".

In addition, clicking on the tune pane causes the tune to be redrawn
after any edits you make in the edit pane.

Clicking on "Transformations" brings up a window allowing you to select
the options that you want abc2abc to apply. The available options are:

New Spacing (on by default). The spaces between notes determine how notes
are grouped with beams. This option groups notes together in a standard
way depending upon the time signature.

Always use the current [ ] notation for chords and ( ) for slurs. Some
older abc files may use the obsolete / deprecated notation + + and s s
to represent these.

Note Lengths: This option allows to double or halve the note length of
every note. The L: value is adjusted accordingly so that the displayed
music is not affected.

Transpose. This allows you to transpose a tune into any other key
signature. This involves raising or lower the pitch of each note by a
number of semitones between -6 and +6.

Key Signature Removal : This is an experimental feature. The idea is that
instead of the key signature shown at the start of the stave, the tune
is notated in the key of C (which has no sharps or flats) and any notes
that are not in the key of C are notated either as the note below with
a sharp or the note above with a flat.