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HTML5 Guitar Tab Editor with custom language (vexflow.com)
55 points by ebun on June 14, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 12 comments



Nice. This is one of those things that once you see it you wonder how it got to be 2010 without anybody having done it yet.

Here are a few of my initial observations:

- Why justify the notes? It's common to use spacing as an informal way of indicating timing, so if you auto-justify everything you make that impossible.

- Are Chords on the way?

- Are you planning to write an importer for the 12 zillion existing tabs in ASCII format? I imagine most of them are parseable.


In the comments of his most recent blog post, the author mentions support for parsing ASCII tabs will be left to third-parties, with rendering using his library.

http://0xfe.blogspot.com/2010/06/fonts-tablature-svg-and-dem...


You can already create chords: (5/2.6/3.7/4)


Nice execution but as always I wonder why the author preferred canvas over SVG. Nothing wrong with canvas but aren't those tabs a perfect example of a vector graphic?

edit: SVG typo.


Support for rendering in SVG via the RaphaelJS library has been added now:

http://0xfe.blogspot.com/2010/06/fonts-tablature-svg-and-dem...


I was thinking that an ASCII output option would be appropriate, given the TAB file tradition.


Did you mean SVG?


Probably. Canvas seems like the wrong tool for this task – just try printing the tabs.


Very neat stuff. I've actually been working on a site that basically does tab collaboration (kinda like Github for music/tabs) and have been pondering how to do something like this.

It'd be pretty cool if somehow you could incorporate a means of playing that tab as well but I can't think of how to do that without flash. I suppose time signatures would be important to have as well.


Playing is kind of possible today with some hacks, though you would need time signatures on the tab.

I think we're going to move towards the browser as a music composition tool soon, and I can't wait. Some people at Mozilla are working on an awesome audio data api spec, check out their demos/videos: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API


Griever: Get in touch with me -- I'd love to collaborate on that project, or at least provide feedback on it.


Question: how to put chords there? I saw image of this at your blog post, but can't figure it out at the demo.




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