TAB formatting option

[wulf]

How about a tab formatting option to help people post useable musical snippets?

If you look at the thread asking for the Shave and Haircut Riff, you'll see my explanation of how I make sure my tab snippets line up (mono-spaced font and making sure multiple spaces don't run together when rendered by the browser).

I was thinking of knocking up a simple PHP utility to apply appropriate formatting to a block of tab that could then be copy and pasted across ... and then it struck me that maybe we could have a tab code ([ tab] ... [ /tab]) to turn this:

G|---------------5---|-
D|-----2---3-4-5-----|-
A|-3-----------------|-
E|-------------------|-
q q t t t q

into this:

G|---------------5---|-
D|-----2---3-4-5-----|-
A|-3-----------------|-
E|-------------------|-
   q   q    t t t q

Whaddya think?

Wulf

[JMX]

I just use [code]

[FretNoMore]

www.activebass.com has a really neat online "line builder" where you can enter a bass line and play it with different bass sounds, even with drums. You can then save it and show others. Something like that would be cool. Even better if it showed real score as well as tab.

[wulf]

The reason I don't use [ code ] is that I don't like the 'artifacts' it leaves round the information:

this is a code block

Also, it's not one of the available buttons. I think we could safely loose the 'PHP' button (I've never seen it used on this forum) and replace it with a tab button.

The line builder might be a neat idea, but it would certainly be a 'non-trivial' task to get it to produce standard notation on the fly!

Wulf

[Matt Till]

Hmmm, I didn't know this exsisted, or what it was for. Crazy.

[Matt Till]

Originally posted by wulf
Also, it's not one of the available buttons.

It's the # button for code.


I don't understand why you don't just use the Courier font, it's not that much of a hassle.

[wulf]

Okay - you're right about that... I'd assumed it was part of creating a list (a side effect of too much wikifying!).

However, while putting something in courier is pretty easy, remembering to replace all the spaces with HTML non-breaking space entities is a little more complex.

Since I don't see many code or PHP snippets here but a reasonable number of tab examples I'd like to see a button to help speed that process.

Wulf

[paul]

Great idea - a forum software upgrade is in our future (VBulletin 3.0), and when that's implemented I'll see about building in a TAB formatting button.

[Wrong Robot]

Hey paul could you divulge when that update that you've been talking about will happen? I was over at the vB webpage they said 2.3 is the current version, but I didn't find any info about the future, I assume you will make an announcement when the time is right.