I think I'd give a yes and no to that Joe. Songwright does seem to work for the purposes here but it has the disadvantage of being a proprietary format and one that is no longer developed.

I think abc will get there and it does have the advantage that there is active development. Another advantage with abc is that it is a plain text format (I think Songwright is a binary - haven't got one to check) making it easier to store a database and to post to newsgroups and forums. One real drawback with abc BTW is the way it allows dotted rythms using < and > symbols - I don't need to tell you what that can do where HTML is involved!

I don't belive anyone of us can give a definitave right or wrong but it is my belief that in the future, abc will prove to be the best choice for our (both the dt and folkino - our needs are quite similar) purposes and at least in situations where I am in control of what programs are used (I mean getting things like png, pdf and midi from folkinfo abcs using the conversion routines there) I believe we can produce pretty reasonable output.

Whatever, its a tough one for all of us.

Jon