Foolestroupe, thanks for the advice re the TIM site. The first font is where I originally stole the idea. As I acknowledged at the start of this thread it is unfortunately diatonic only and reverses the logical order of upper and lower case letters used for the scale in ABC Notation.

The second font looks really excellent, but it's a music font as opposed to a tablature font. It's probably better used in instruction books or in a program like HARMONY which could inter alia provide Larson's interpretations of grace notes on the printed page. I'm not aware that ABC Notation makes explicit provisions for the rolls etc that Larson has so carefully documented. In fact by contrast the conventional design philosopphy for most notation is to minimise ornamentation.

Pavane, I don't have any problems with positioning using my simple text concept, but admittedly I haven't trird it out with Harmony - please bear in mind this was somewhat of a teaser project a couple of years ago. If HARMONY allows you to select the Font Type and Size for the lyric line, then each Note Name is entered as a separate Lyric Syllable. Or you can import an ABC file with W: aligned lyrics (but using the root Note Name instead of conventional lyrics). Whether HARMONY allows sufficient height for the lyric line is clearly problematical. (I used NWC as my test vehicle a couple of years ago 'cos that's what a lot of Mudcatters used at that time - it allows a lot of flexibility in space between staves).

Mine is a simple concept, but it works quite well within its current build specs. If you were to use your existing parser to write a lyric syllable for each note, then the instrument's range is the only limit.

You can make provision for double sharps, odd characters for syncopation, tuplets etc. In fact once you've parsed correctly to a Midi value the hard work has all been done. I may have sent you a copy of my font in the past, but let me know if you'd like a copy - if I can find the b----- thing.

Regards, John