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mdgBookSVG1ecdKit

One-Command Kit for Creating an MDG English Country Dances Collection Book

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mdgBookSVG1ecdKit

Here’s an opportunity for one to “compose” English Country Dances and to author a Collection Book of such!!!

[Audio sample:   ogg    midi]

This folder contains materials that allow the user to author a book containing a collection of Musical Dice Games (MDG) English Country Dances (ECD), generated based on the rules given in Musikalisches Würferspiel, K.Anh.C.30.01 (1792/93) - Englische Contretänze.

To create a book, simply download (or clone: git clone https://github.com/justineuro/mdgBookSVG1ecdKit.git) this project to one’s computer, unzip the downloaded archive, and at the command line inside the main folder (mdgBookSVG1ecdKit or mdgBookSVG1ecdKit-main directory) issue the following command (pre-requisites: bash, abcmidi, abcm2ps, Ghostscript, Inkscape, and LaTeX):

bash HOWTO

Wait for a few minutes, i.e., until one gets the bash prompt again. The compiled book in PDF format (mdgBookSVG1ecdv1.pdf), among other things, should be located in the res folder (subdirectory).

For the Impatient

To download and examine an example of a book (mdgBookSVG1ecdv1.pdf) that was generated in a similar manner, simply right-click (then “Save Link As …”) on the following image:

Front Cover

(Note: To enable the MIDI audio links in the book, one should download mdgBookSVGecdv1-midis.zip and unzip in the same directory in one’s computer that contains the book, i.e., the book and midi files have to be in the same directory).

Important Parameters

To personalize one’s generated book (in addition to the randomly generated ECDs), one may want to change some of the default parameters/values in the following (all three files are initially found in the main directory but are eventually moved into the res folder):

Once the desired changes have been made to the files above, one can then re-compile the book by issuing, in the res subdirectory, the last set of commands in the HOWTO file:

pdflatex -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode -shell-escape mdgBookSVG1ecdv1.tex
bibtex mdgBookSVG1ecdv1.aux
pdflatex -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode -shell-escape mdgBookSVG1ecdv1.tex
pdflatex -synctex=1 -interaction=nonstopmode -shell-escape mdgBookSVG1ecdv1.tex

Also, line 32 of the HOWTO is set by default so that each new book created contains 250 ECDs. One may wish to change this number, as desired, to some other counting number. This has to be done before issuing the bash HOWTO command within the mdgBookSVG1ecdKit-main directory.

Similar Kits (by the same author) on GitHub

MDG Book kits similar to this may be found on related GitHub sites such as:

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) for making available the score of Musikalisches Würferspiel, K.Anh.C.30.01 (1792/93) - Englische Contretänze, Opus Infinity for additional related information, and Amaranth Publishing for a copy of mozart.zip. My sincerest gratitude to Chris Walshaw et al. for the ABC music notation; Jean-Francois Moine for abcm2ps and the accompanying examples, templates, and pointers for the appropriate use of these resources; Guido Gonzato for the ABC Plus Project and the abcmidi resources available there, more especially for the ABC resource book Making Music with ABC 2; James R. Allwright and Seymour Shlien for abcmidi source and binaries; Nils Liberg, Jan Wybren de Jong, Seymour Shlien et al. for EasyABC; Artifex, Inc. for Ghostscript v.10.00.0 (includes the ps2pdf converter); Inkscape v.1.2.2 for the tool for converting SVGs to PDFs for inclusion into LaTeX documents; Peter Hanappe et al. for FluidSynth v.2.3.1 that was used for converting midi to ogg; Google Lens and Google Translate for aiding in producing the English versions of the text of Musikalisches Würferspiel, K.Anh.C.30.01; Colomban Wendling et. al for Geany 2.0 IDE; and User:Martin H for his reply to a TeX/LaTeX Stack Exchange question on including SVGs into LaTeX documents. Ditto to Machtelt Garrels for the book Bash Guide for Beginners, Vivek Gite for the book Linux Script Shell Tutorial, Steve Parker for the Unix/Linux Shell Cheatsheet. John Fogarty’s GitHub Site: Latex CreateSpace BookCover and Peter Wilson’s reply in TeX/LaTeX Stack Exchange on designing a book cover were sources of ideas, information, and materials for creating the book cover and title page, thanks to both of them. Many thanks to the Debian Project for the Debian 12 (Bookworm) GNU/Linux OS, TeXLive 2024 for the TeX distribution, to Brian Fox for Bash, and GitHub for its generosity in providing space for this project.

License

mdgBookSVG1ecdKit by Justine Leon A. Uro is marked with CC0 1.0 Universal