Jon, Thanks for adding your experience with the ABC tablature programs. I confess I don't really use tablature enough to have that level of insight. I had discovered that abctab2ps required non-standard ABC encoding and for that reason I haven't really used it either.

I do agree that TablEdit has a lot going for it. I use their free viewer to display tablature files downloaded from the Net. TablEdit claims to import ABC but since I haven't tried the full program, I don't know how that shows up in tablature. Does TablEdit provide the ability to represent instruments other than guitar in standard tuning? (I mentioned abc2tab only because dulcimer tab is one of their claimed strengths. I'm sorry to learn that it doesn't really work.)

I think there is a basic weakness in any software that attempts to construct tablature from the notes alone. It means the user relys on the the software developer to decide how best to play a piece of music. This is extremely limiting. It may be useful for a rank beginner who can't figure out where to find melody notes on his instrument but, past that, it doesn't really help with performance. The chief value of tablature over standard notation lies in the ability of one musician to pass the precise technical details of performance to others.

Of course the ABC Plus project includes an ABC preprocessor (abcpp) that lets you code simple macros into the source ABC file. This lets the user create one file that may be used for printing a score via abcm2ps, a MIDI file via abc2midi or tablature via abctab2ps. I haven't tried using abcpp for tablature but I've used in in files where I needed both printed and MIDI output and I needed features in the score that weren't acceptable to the abc2midi program.

      - Mark