Installation of this program is not a trivial task unless most of the components are already on your computer (which is probably the case if you are running Unix). Before doing the installation, you should look at the other documentation to ensure this program serves your purposes.
Runabc.tcl is a tcl/tk script which requires a Tcl/Tk environment. To execute runabc.tcl you should have Tcl/Tk 8.4 which you can find at dev.scriptics.com. The package without the source code is somewhat over 9 Mbytes on my computer.
Alternatively, you can execute runabc.kit which will run on any system where tclkit has been installed. Tclkit has been ported to almost every system and is about 1 megabyte. You can get tclkit from www.equi4.com/tclkit.html and then go to the link downloads matrix. This may be the preferable approach, if you have an older version of Tcl/Tk (eg. 8.3) on your system and you do not feel comfortable building a new version from source. Version 8.4.9 is fine. The link how to get started tells you how to setup tclkit on your system. (For Windows, you should also associate the .kit extension with tclkit.)
If you are running on a PC with Windows 95/98/ME/NT4/NT2000/XP then you can execute runabc.exe which has the whole tcl/tk environment built in.
Note that even if you are only running runabc.kit or runabc.exe, you still need to download runabc.zip and unpack it. Besides runabc.tcl, it contains other useful stuff, such as an icon (runabc.ico), *.fmt files for abc*2ps, sample abc files and a description of the latest updates in runhistory.txt. Note that all the files including runabc.tcl are text files which can be viewed with any editor.
You also need the James Allwrights's abcMIDI package consisting of abc2midi, yaps and abc2abc. James Allwright is no longer supporting this package and I have made numerous fixes as well as added new features. You should download sources of the latest version from my main page top level and compile it on your system. Precompiled versions for various systems are available on Guido Gonzato's site The abcplus Homepage. You can find James Allwrights last version on his site abc.sourceforge.net/abcMIDI/. Abc2midi is a wonderful little utility that generates MIDI files from abc files.
To convert the abc files to postscript files displaying the sheet music, you need Michael Methfessel's package abc2ps Please be sure to download the latest version number 1.3.3. Michael has stopped supporting abc2ps several years ago. Other clones of this package such as abcm2ps are in continuous development. I recommend that you also download Jeff Moine abcm2ps.
A MIDI player is also handy. They usually come with the operating system or sound card. If you have the capability of playing audio files but no MIDI capability, you could download the TiMidity package. Free SoundFont patches for Timidity may be obtained from Big Soundfont
Finally you need a Postscript viewer such as Ghostview. The Ghostview package with all its fonts is about 6 Megabytes. For Windows, you should download the latest version of gsview as well as ghostscript.
Though all of this stuff looks intimidating it is at least all free and you can even get all the source code. Alternatively, you can try some of the other software packages available from Chris Walshaw's, The abc Homepage.
Return to top level to download runabc.zip.