Output to abc format

I can't answer for anyone else, but I can mention that my own usage would primarily be to share the score with blind musicians who can read ABC via screenreaders (and write it too). I also use ABC to embed the musical examples in most of my educational texts these days, using scripts to automatically convert those snippets into notation by invokving abcm2ps, with the original ABC code retained as metadata attached to the graphic so another script can reverse the process.. It's actually considerably easier for me to maintain a document of any size this way, as opposed to having to track hundreds of indiivdual MSCZ files with the examples, or find the hundreds of relevant passages within a single MSCZ file. And the end result is a document that is also readable to blind musicians. But since I recognize that most educators aren't goong to be so willing to create their own educational materials using ABC directly, I am still looking to develop a convenient path for people to develop their musical examples in MuseScore and have both the graphic and ABC renditions exported from MuseScore and imported into a text document, to faciliatw the development of blind-friendly educational materials.

ABC is not really common on the blind community, BTW. Nothing really is except Braille music, which requires special hardware to produce and is essentially "read omly" - even among the relatively small number of bkind musicians who know how to read it, there are no facilities to allow them to write it. And then no facilities to allow a sighted musician who does not know Braille to read their work. So it's kind of useless as a way of integrating a blind musician into a mainstream educational setting. ABC, however, has proven quite useful to me and my blond student.

But FWIW, I do agree that MuseScore should focus on MusicXML export and then hope that the conversion to ABC can be achieved with other tools. Or at some point, I might try to write a plugin to export ABC directly. It actually wouldn't be that hard, I don't think. Might not be able to handle every last score element, but for the type of purposes I care about, just communicating the basic intend of the music is good enough.

I'll also answer only for myself, but... ABC notation is very popular among those who play Irish traditional music. Assuming you can get an ITM player to admit to using any sort of notation in the first place... :-)

- Jeff

I use a site that has a lot of ABC notation and I was thinking of posting to the site some of my own scores. That's why I wondered if Musescore could export ABC. I did find the Easy ABC site after I browsed around here for a while and it is very effective. The funny thing is though I tried to re-import the ABC created using the Musescore plugin but I kept getting an error message "tag mismatch at line 4 column 7" (I tried a couple of different scores and got the same message) This indicates that the ABC produced by Easyabc is not compatible with the plugin used to import ABC to Musescore. I have had this error before when trying to import ABC so it is not unique to this combination.
I did manage an import from Easyabc by cutting and pasting between the two products.
Computer technology is a great reminder of the notice we had on our office wall years ago.
"when you are up to your neck in alligators and snakes it is easy to forget that the primary object of the exercise was to drain the swamp"