I agree that Mansfield's tutorial is very good, especially for one just starting out. I should have referenced that as well. He provides an index page to help navigate to particular subjects and when he introduces a subject, he doesn't try to give us all the information there is all in one gulp.

I like Gonzato's manual for other reasons. As a life-long computer guy, I've learned so many markup and scripting languages that ABC is just ‘another one of those.’ I can get more value from a complete reference manual than I can from a primer, and I like having the contents/index side by side with the text for navigation. I also prefer having my electronic documents look like well-composed and properly typeset printed pages. I do most of my work on a notebook computer with a very high resolution screen and keep my font sizes consistant with an actual printed page. Mansfield's tutorial is excellent but requires too much jumping around for someone past the tutorial stage.

Neil, can you point me to the examples of syntax which have no support in the standards document? I know you follow the evolution of the standard way more closely than I and I'd like to check this out.

Jon, I agree with you about the nonstandardness of the standard. The ABC standard really needs to be turned over to the IETF or W3C and undergo a proper standards process. Having ABC recognized as a MIME type doesn't mean developers have a stable and complete standard to work with. In my view, ABC+ is elegant, simple and covers the needs of most musicians and composers. The original ABC was clever and useful to fiddlers and tin-whistlers but too limited to replace MusicTeX and LilyPond. ABC+, on the other hand, has the potential to become a musical lingua franca on the Internet and makes far fewer technical demands on the user.

      - Mark