Any number of spaces and tabs can be put in almost anywhere except in the middle of a word. Each statement goes on a separate line. If for some reason you wish to split a statement onto several lines, each but the last must end with a "\" (backslash) character, to tell Mup to treat the next line as a continuation of the current line. Blank lines can be put between statements to make things easier to read.
Comments begin with two slashes and continue to end of line. All comments
will be totally ignored by Mup, and are for your own use to remind yourself
of something. For example:
// Note: in some early manuscripts, this chord had an accent
Staffs are numbered from top to bottom, starting at staff 1.
Several different units are used for distances. One is inches or centimeters (the units parameter is used to select which you want to use). Another is "stepsizes." One stepsize is half the distance between two staff lines. In the horizontal dimension, "counts" are sometimes used. A "count" refers to the musical duration of a note with a duration of the denominator (bottom number) of the time signature. The actual distance on the page will vary depending on how Mup determines notes should be placed.
Upper and lower case letters are not interchangeable. Thus, for example, "SCORE" is not the same as "score."
Most lines of input end with a semicolon. There are some kinds of input that do not require an ending semicolon, but Mup will allow semicolons on those too, so that if you can't remember if a given command requires a semicolon or not, you can just use one anyway. For the examples in this User's Guide, semicolons are not used when they are not necessary.*
In a number of statements, Mup expects a text string. All strings must be
enclosed in double quotes. For example:
"This is a string." "Allegro"
A string can contain any combination of letters, numbers, spaces, and punctuation. It can also contain various things that will cause printing of special music characters, change font and size, and so forth. Those things are covered in the chapter on text strings.