Comment by SaberTail
8 hours ago
The name is misleading. The glyphs are showing individual chord shapes. I can't write out a song using this. At best I can use this at the top of a tab to remind myself how the chords are meant to be shaped. But that doesn't appear to work much beyond the basic cowboy chords. For example, I tried 577655 which is an A major barre chord, and it didn't render. I realize a font can only do so much, but I wouldn't pay for this.
Hmm yeah I guess what I really want is a maekdown style mini-language that compiles to tab format.
AlphaTex?
https://alphatab.net/docs/alphatex/introduction
Not quite MD, but fairly easy to learn.
"VexTab is a language that allows you to easily create, edit, and share standard notation and guitar tablature. Unlike ASCII tab, which is designed for readability, VexTab is designed for writeability."
https://vexflow.com/vextab/tutorial.html
There's no such thing as "Tab format". Tabs are just ascii text.
I had people who had been writing Tabs on paper for a very long time. I would wager that ascii is just a representation
lol markdown and html are also both ascii/unicode and by themselves disprove your point.
2 replies →
Isn't that what LilyPond does, more or less?
Not really. The lilypond format is extremely...complicated and obscure (and that's my polite take on it). Even simple stuff is quite complex. Very very far from Markdown's virtually WYSIWYG.
yeah this is not what guitar tabs are and I don't think a font should be used to do it or is the best method to do it. It can get really messy with time signature changes and managing all the strings and marks etc just by text and a font
I was excited for a second, because this is one piece of the puzzle (chords), then numerals solve melodies (you can just type something like 0-1 for open string first string, etc), then just need something for ornamentation. Seems like it only matches against a known set of chords, though.