On Tuesday 28 October 2008 13:18:06 River Tarnell wrote:
i have written a new extension to embed music scores
in MediaWiki pages:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/mediawiki/wiki/Extension:ABC
unlike the Lilypond extension, this uses a simple input language (ABC) that
is much easier to validate for security. ABC is mostly used to transcribe
Irish trad and other simple tunes, but it recently gained support for more
advanced features, e.g. multiple staves and lyrics. this is supported in
the extension using the 'abcm2ps' tool.
unlike the existing ABC extension (AbcMusic), it doesn't support opening
arbitrary files as ABC input (which is a potential security issue), and has
several additional features:
- The original ABC can be downloaded easily
- The score can be downloaded as PDF, PostScript, MIDI or Ogg Vorbis
- A media player can be embedded in the page to play the media file
i believe the ABC format is suitable for transcribing the majority of
scores currently on Wikimedia projects. although it can't handle all of
them, it is better than the current situation. plus, as ABC is simple, and
existing ABC scores are easily available, it's easier for novice users to
contribute.
i would be interested to hear peoples' thoughts on enabling this extension
on Wikimedia.
One caveat only: in my tests, abc2midi didn't support the same ABC format
abcm2ps did. I don't think it is a big problem, and if it turns out to be, it
could be solved simply by adding an option to disable sound rendering.