TabFont โ€“ guitar tabs rendered as you type

(philatype.com)

57 points | by ChrisArchitect 3 days ago ago

14 comments

  • tadfisher 6 minutes ago

    I love tablature because it allowed me to learn the songs that I love and bring joy when I play. I hate tablature because it's like reading English as it's written out in IPA.

    I want finger positions and staff notation so I can learn the theory while actually playing the dang song correctly. I credit tablature and my lazy programmer mind for putting off the theory. Also (channeling Tantacrul here) staff notation is the worst notation, except for all the others.

  • SaberTail 2 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.

    • djtriptych 2 hours ago

      Hmm yeah I guess what I really want is a maekdown style mini-language that compiles to tab format.

      • TylerE an hour ago

        There's no such thing as "Tab format". Tabs are just ascii text.

      • Finnucane an hour ago

        Isn't that what LilyPond does, more or less?

        • TylerE an hour ago

          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.

    • altmanaltman an hour ago

      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

  • sshanky an hour ago

    Does anyone find the little "finger" shapes confusing? I would rather see circles, so my brain doesn't have to adapt to a new way of reading tabs. Also, the inverted "D" shape is hard to parse because it's not a symmetric shape. Cool idea, other than that! It reminds me of this new QR code font I read about just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48703200

    • TylerE 36 minutes ago

      Yeah, as a guitarist this is hideously non-standard. Definition of change for the sake of change.

  • jakefleming 3 days ago

    This is one of those things that should obviously exist and I'm mad I didn't think of it!

  • tuvix 2 hours ago

    Extremely cool. This got me thinking that I would love to have a mermaid-like dsl for creating full tabs and apparently it exists![0]

    [0] https://github.com/0xfe/vextab

  • djtriptych 2 hours ago

    OMG. This solves like 8 problems with me. Currently teaching my niece guitar basics and have always wanted this for my guitar videos.

  • altmanaltman an hour ago

    Why does the number of chords in the library change as you scroll? It should remain static no?

  • efilife 3 days ago

    So awesome. Sad it isn't getting the attention it deserves