Thanks, Stanron. I will try FLS one day on my Linux system. For the time being, I will stick to ABCExplorer on Windows, but I have the strong feeling, or hope at least, that the days of Windows are numbered. The latest ransomware scandal may have tolled the bell.

A pity that each ABC software seems to be "quirky with regard to acceptable syntax" in different ways. If developers find the original language description impractical (- why?), they had best emulate the tool abc2xml.py which ties ABC to MusicXML in a very efficient way. (The Yahoo discussion group formerly favoured by Chris Walshaw seems pretty quiet for quite a while, which may indicate that we cannot hope for much progress.)