I suppose it will do no harm to post our recent experience here...

Overall, abcm2ps has worked quite well for us. I, and I think ed have been using Noteworthy and converting to abc using ABC2NWC. Apart from getting an extra staff (easily removed from the abc) there have been few problems.

Our biggest problem to date came to light with a song called The Bloody Garden

We found that abc2ps (as used at concertina.net) and ABC2NWC handle lyrics under grace notes differently to abcm2ps. abcm2ps (correctly according to the abc draft) does not align lyrics under grace notes but the other packages do.

abcm2ps does appear to have its own quirk with the handling of slurs and grace notes in that it seems impossible to end a slur on a grace note. (a{bc}) would produce a slur that continues to the end of a bar but (a{bc}d) would end the slur where expected.

The word "vir-gin" in The Bloody Garden is an example where we have modified the position of the slur in order to produce reasonable output. In this case, the text we were working from has markings that could be interpreted in more than one way so I don't see any harm in using our own interpretation but I do see the problem itself as less than desirable.

I've been a bit critical about one small item but overall, I do like abcm2ps and it seems to suit our purpose of generating files on the fly very nicely. There are a lot of features that we haven't tried yet, several of which are not available from the long list of command line options but can be set via a "configuration file" or by adding lines starting with %% in the abc.

I guess John is right in a way by suggesting you need to be a "propeller head" but on the other hand, it is a nice clean, compact (<200K) efficient program. Although the options are duanting, I think it would be possible to work out your faviourite opions and (Windows users) write a small DOS batch file, perhaps passing output to Ghostsript if you can't print postscript and create yourself a very simple command line.

Jon