Grishka - I'd like to think that if there's a standard posted on Chris Walshaw's site it will lead developers to support it.

I haven't looked at abc programs for a while (a few years ago I had about 26 different progs on my XP machine, all of which I'd looked at!), but I just did a quick look at a bunch of them from the listing on the abcnotation site and it's rare to find a mention on the developers' sites of what version of abc they support. (I think the one exception was a support for abc1.6. And abcm2ps does list its support in detail). It may well be included in the detail manuals, but I don't really want to download everything just to find out what is supported.

I'll try and have a look at some of them this week and see if I can get some idea of the current state of play. I'm running mainly on Ubuntu now (it's extremely rarely that I boot my old XP machine), but I'm about to install a virtual XP machine this weekend (one of the reasons is to support Finale!) so I'll be able to check out the Windows and Linux progs at least. Someone else will have to give a report on the Mac state of play. (I did look at the cross platform list on abcnotation and of the few programs that support all three platforms I don't think any said they supported 2.1 or 2.0). Many of the programs listed are wrappers for abcm2ps and abc2midi. Melody Assistant is a cross-platform shareware wysiwyg editor that can output abc, but it's not clear what version is supported (and I personally hate the user interface - that is one I've looked at in the last year or so). So for now at least I'll be staying with a text editor and abcm2ps (which for many years has probably been the fullest implementation of the abc standards post 1.6).

Mick