1. Thanks for the info Steve, it is alway good to know what works for info to pass to others.

2. John, I'm not a guru in anything and in terms of languages am more comfortable with Pascal than anything else. It's just that even I can get used to seeing parts of programming as logic and a number of languages are C like - these would include Java, php and perl. I would get lost in any language after a while and don't have the brains to run to assembly language of any sort.

Something like folkinfo is far easier to me than these small scripts as there is no need to get into things like parsing bits like abc. They may take some planning, a little knowledge over database principles, etc. but believe me, these people who can come up with something like the attempt at the tab program are far better than I (and on a programming level, far more "ifs", etc are involved than anything I normally play with.

That said, I give it a go and I've updated http://www.folkinfo.org/temp/abctabw.zip with a hack that I hope may ease problems with acidentals. I really don't have the time to test.

Jon