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Manuscript Writer home page

Manuscript Writer is a music notation program that I hacked in the mid-1990s to help with school music work. Its input is terse and is based on SMX code (e.g. O2L4cdL8efL4g) with many additions.

Manuscript Writer is rarely needed nowadays, because:

GNU Lilypond produces much better typesetting; here is a mostly-automatic Manuscript Writer to Lilypond converter. (Lilypond data entry can also be made more convenient with 4DML, especially if you like an `aspect-oriented' approach.)
Director Musices does a better job of playing pieces that do not already have detailed dynamic markup
This MIDI add depth script post-processes any MIDI file to add the pan and reverb settings that Manuscript Writer would have used for different orchestral instruments
If you need to play MIDI files through a PC-style beeper then you can try this MIDI Beeper script

Manuscript Writer is still here because very occasionally it's needed for something that other programs don't yet do; for example it can produce (old-style) Braille music and includes a Braille music tutor mode. It may also be useful if you need to run on very old hardware.

Unix (version 10.3): Download unix.tar.gz, unpack it, and see the README file for installation instructions. Here is a patch to make it compile on more modern systems.

DOS or dosemu (version 10.1): full version (664k) or smaller version (392k), both self-extracting archives. This version has a bug that can corrupt MIDI output; to work around it, use the /NOPITCHBEND command-line parameter.

Documentation and examples are included in the above downloads.