Copyright © 2016 David A. Randolph Copyright © 2016 David A. Randolph
AbcDE, the Didactyl Editor for abc music notation, provides a straightforward way to add fingering annotations to piano music. Intended primarily to collect data for researchers studying cognitive aspects of piano fingering, it also provides a convenient way for pianists to create nicely typeset music scores to reflect their personal fingering preferences.
To finger a note, first select it by clicking it. When selected, the note turns red or blue. (If the note is red, you are specifying a fingering for the right hand. If the note is blue, the fingering will be for the left hand.) You may then do one of the following:
The vast majority of fingering entry you do will likely be accomplished by these few actions.
If you are using a touch-capable device, a keypad should display at the bottom of your screen. If you do not see the keypad, click Preferences (
) and ensure that Keypad is set to Show.
The selection will move automatically to the next note when you have entered a potentially complete fingering. The sequence of note selection proceeds from low to high (for chords and other synchronous notes) and then left to right (through time).
AbcDE renders all fingering annotations for the right hand in a serif font (Bookman). For contrast, it renders all left hand annotations in a bold non-serif font (Helvetica-Bold). This typesetting convention is adopted for conciseness over more traditional RH: or LH: markings. (It should also make it easier to distinguish fingering annotations from tuplet decorations, which are typically rendered in an italic serif font.)
All right-hand annotations are also rendered above the note. All annotations for the left hand are rendered below the note.
By default, fingerings entered for notes on the upper staff are assumed to be for the right hand. Similarly, the default hand for notes on the lower staff is the left hand.
To override this behavior, press the <T> key. You will notice that the selected note has changed color. If the note is red, you are specifying a fingering for the right hand. If the note is blue, you mean the left hand. Also note that the area around the printed score has turned black. This is to remind you that you are in toggle mode: any fingerings you enter will be assigned to the non-default hand for the staff.
This behavior will persist until you press the <T> key again. Doing so will return you to the default hand mode.
You can undo your previous actions by pressing the <Z> key or clicking 
on the on-screen keypad. To redo, press <Y> or 
.
Enter fingerings for chords from the lowest note to the highest. The chord will remain selected until each note has been annotated. To enter a partial annotation for a chord, press <TAB> or <RIGHT ARROW>. Such partial annotations, when rendered, should be interpreted as applying to the lowest notes of the chord.
In some situations, you may use a different finger to release a key from the one you used to strike it. AbcDE supports annotating such finger substitutions like this:
You may also use dialog entry to perform this infrequent task.
AbcDE presents and outputs music as it is scored. It does not unfold repeated sections. If you want to specify different fingerings for the first and last time a particular note is played in a repeated section, take these steps:
Grace note fingerings must be entered from low to high and left to right. Only single finger annotations are allowed for each element of a grace note. No alternate fingerings or re-positionings are currently allowed.
Any single-pitch, non-grace note may be assigned a sequence of fingering digits to capture how to finger an ornament. Typically, such notes will be assigned an ornamentation symbol (e.g., trill, mordent, grupetto), but abcDE does not require any such symbols to be present.
To assign an ornamented fingering to a note, do the following:
An ornamented pitch may either be fully fingered in parentheses, or any repeated finger patterns may be omitted. For example, a trilled note may be annotated equivalently as (12121212121) or (121).
Using the entry methods described above, a fingering must be entered in one continuous sequence of characters. Use of the <BACKSPACE> key (<DELETE> on Apple devices) will not remove the last character typed. Rather, this key operates on the entire fingering. For finer control over character input, use Dialog entry.
On touch-screen devices in particular, we recommend using the Zoom In (
) and Zoom Out (
) buttons in the control bar to change the size of the displayed music. Pinching or double-tapping will resize the entire window and may render the keypad inaccessible. Using and , you can resize the score from 30% to 300%.
In lieu of the "blind entry" methods described above, you may enter fingerings via a popup window. If you are working with a mouse or other pointing device, simply double-click a note to open its dialog window. You may also press the <ENTER> key to work on the currently selected note or equivalently click the Target (
) button on the display keypad.
Note that you can enter fingerings for a sequence of notes in a single dialog.
You should be familar with the abcDF syntax to get the most out of dialog entry. Indeed, some aspects of fingering can only be expressed via this dialog interface. If, however, waiting for screens to refresh is making standard (blind) entry cumbersome, you may find that dialog entry is more efficient for even the simplest of annotations.
Entire fingering sequences may be copied to the clipboard via the Clipboard (
) button. Note that Safari does not support this functionality.
Fingering sequences may also be applied wholesale to a piece via the Paper Clip (
) button.
Your fingering input is saved by your browser every five seconds. This mechanism should reduce the chances that you lose any significant amount of work in the event your browser or hardware system crashes.
That said, you should save your work periodically in a format that abcDE can recognize. To do this, first make sure the Annotated checkbox is unchecked. Then click the Download (
) button at the top left of the screen. This should open a dialog window you can use to save a file. The file will be saved in abcD format, which is recognized by abcDE and other Didactyl utilities.
Some browsers do not support directly saving files. You can work around this limitation with the following steps:
) button in the control pane at the top of the screen.This workaround should not be necessary for any modern browser. We recommend Google Chrome for working with abcDE.
Note that all valid abcD files are also valid abc files. As such, they can be opened by any abc editor, such as the desktop application EasyABC or this online tool.
The Print (
) button is available to produce a hard copy or PDF of the engraved score.
AbcDE provides you the option of including the embedded annotations in the printed output or source (abcD) output. This is done by way of the Annotated checkbox on the main control bar. Make sure this box is checked if you want to see annotations in your output.
When printing via the Print (
) button, you typically will include annotations unless you want to view a clean copy of the score.
However, you should not download () with Annotated checked if you will be using AbcDE to perform further annotation work on the file in the future. Embedded annotations will confuse AbcDE's output.
(Raw fingering data are included in the abcD output separate from actual annotations, which are interleaved within the abc code. You can inspect the output via the View () button.)
AbcDE can open piano scores encoded in abcD (.abcd), abc (.abc or .txt), and MusicXML (.xml or .mxl) formats.
To annotate a new file that resides on your local file system, click Choose file. AbcDE can open any valid piano score encoded in the abc notation format.
To annotate abc that resides on the Web, click From the Web (
) and enter the appropriate URL. Book 1 of the "Open" Well Tempered Clavier are available as http://dvdrndlph.github.io/didactyl/abc/OpenWTC/pf01.abc through pf24.abc. But any URL pointing to piano music encoded in abc format (with two staves) may be opened.
Note: If your web content resides in a different Internet domain from where you are running abcDE, the other domain will need to be configured to support cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).
If you are unable to open a file you can otherwise browse to, you can save the file locally and click Choose file to load it into abcDE.
If the screen is blank, simply reload the page in your browser.
If the interface becomes unresponsive, try reloading your browser. If this does not work, exit your browser entirely and re-open the editor page.
If you see annotations duplicated on the rendered score, simply reload the page in your browser.
Other elements may be covering the note you want to select. Try clicking a neighboring note and navigating to the note you want to modify using the arrow keys.
You may not be able to see the Download () button on the left of the control bar at the top of the screen. This is a known problem in Chrome and Safari for iOS.
In Chrome, the Download () button may be covered by an translucent Play button (like 
) for Adobe's Flash Player. (AbcDE uses Flash to perform file downloads.) To perform a download in this circumstance, you first need to run Flash by clicking . Then click to download as normal.
You will need to run Flash manually like this every time you launch abcDE, or you may avoid this inconvenience going forward by following these configuration instructions from Adobe to allow Flash always to run.
The button may also be missing altogether. This is because you do not have the Adobe Flash Player plugin enabled. Adobe also explains how to fix this in their procedure.
Adobe Flash is not supported on Apple's iOS (for iPhone and iPad). Thus, the button is not available. You must use two-step saving in Safari on iOS.
Make sure you do not have more than one browser window (or tab) opened with the same piece.
Copy does not work under Safari. Please complain to Cupertino.
AbcDE is available for your use online. But if you want to configure and host your own instance or otherwise leverage the abcDE JavaScript library, please see the administration guide.
AbcDE would not be possible without the excellent abc2svg JavaScript library by Jef Moine.
We are also indebted to the following open-source content that made our lives easier:
Online documentation is authored in Markdown using the very handy Mou editor.
The Didactyl project has been partially funded by a Provost's Award for Graduate Research from the University of Illinois at Chicago.