(Apologies for any multiple postings - original posting to Renaissance list did not show up after 12 hours.)
Greetings all, Having recently returned to the Lute after a 10 year absence, I was looking round for some software for typesetting lute tabulature. Preferably freeware, of course, as I am only an amateur on a small budget. I found Wayne Cripps' excellent TAB software for typesetting lute and guitar tabulatures, and I am sure the you are all aware of this. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute/AboutTab.html However, as acknowledged on the TAB website, TAB is not particularly user friendly for the new user, being based on plain text and run as a command line application. To visualise the relationship between the plain text input and the typeset output you have to do a mental rotation and reflection. Extra characters can offset the columns so it can prove difficult to verify what you have put down and to visualise how it might be interpreted by TAB. Anyway, I thought it would be worth while trying to put a graphical front end to TAB that would allow you to use a grid based editor (Microsoft Excel!) to create TAB files. Thus TabHelper was born. TabHelper is free software for Microsoft Windows and includes the following features: - provides a simple graphical front end to TAB, using MS Excel as the editor. (The TAB binary is included as part of TabHelper installation) - allows printing directly to PDF if GhostScript is also installed on the machine (must be installed separately) - TAB plain text format can be copied to the clipboard - includes the manual for TAB written by Leonard Williams For further details and to download, visit the TabHelper web page: http://www.marmaladefoo.com/docs/software/tabhelper/introduction Any feedback is very welcome, and I hope it will prove useful to some of you. Also if anyone has any suggestions of other lute or guitar communities that might be interested in using it, please let me know. Best Wishes - Luke __________________________________________ Various gadgets widgets, links and chat http://www.marmaladefoo.com __________________________________________ To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
