Making vector images from musical scores

This was published on a personal blog I ran during the nillies, it’s included here as a historical archive. Links and images may be broken, it’s been a while.

Summary of the original Dutch article.

This article describes how to edit a musical score, export it, convert it to a vector based image format, edit it and import it in an openoffice writer document, all using open source progams that are available for Ubuntu. I wrote it because I spent half a day figuring out how to achieve this. Here’s a short outline of the process.

• Create a musical document with either Noteedit or Denemo. Export as an ABC file.
• Convert the ABC to a Postscript (ps) file with abcm2ps
• Convert the Postscipt file to an SVG (Scalabel vector graphics) with pstoedit
• Either edit with Inkscape and save as EPS or
• Install the OpenOffice import filter for SVG and edit with OOo Draw
• Either import the EPS in your writer document, or just copy/paste from OOo Draw

If you don’t speak Dutch and want to read the whole article, let me know (click on ‘Contact’ at the top of the page) and I will translate it.