I have had great success in using ABC notation. To strip it down to the bare essentials:

ABC is a method of notating tunes that uses upper and lowercase letters to denote the notes. Slurs, ties, triplets, chords, and even bowing indications (for fiddlers)are easily shown. Of course, you need to learn the program before you can use it effectively!

ABC2Win is a program that will turn ABC notation into sheet music. Code must be entered correctly or sheet music won't print out properly.

ABCMus is a program that will play ABC notation so that you can hear the tune. Actually ABC2Win will do this too but not as well as ABCMus.

ABC notation works especially well for traditional tunes. It is not meant to incorporate all the symbols used in musical notation yet so some things can't be used with ABC. The few examples of this are not coming to my mind this morning, sorry.

With regard to slurs and ties - slurs are shown with the use of parentheses marks ( ) while the tie is shown with the use of the hyphen mark -.

Richard