It seems to me that some song tabs look very nice (evenly spaced, or tightly aligned with the song lyrics underneath) and some look sloppy--what causes this? I guess the real question is what is the best way to format the tabs? I've posted a couple of songs and they never look as clean as some of the other postings.

You almost have to write the tabs to fit the website. Most people write them else where and then post them on here. The problem with that is the spacing involved.

Thanks.

I do all mine in notepad then just cut and paste.

Before the database was changed, we were limited to only so much storage space for each tab. This means there was a bit or reformatting to make it all fit. Some of my tabs have no punctuation or extra spaces to meet the requirements. Now with no limits, I can position the numbers over each vowel properly and leave in all the punctuation.

yea, that used to be a pain in the butt.

Use a proportional font, like courior to format your tabs.

Format with the space bar - not with the tab key.

When it looks good, cut and paste it.

If it does not look good, edit it and paste it again.

chibluesteve wrote:

>
> Use a proportional font, like courior to format your tabs.
>

Actually, that would be a monospace font. Proportional fonts are ones like Times New Roman, Arial, Book Antiqua, Tahoma, & Verdana.

I personally prefer either Andale Mono (absolute favorite) or Lucida Console (similar to Andale Mono, but without the dot in the zero) to Courier New & Courier, but you definitely want to use a monospace font, whatever font it may be (even if it's Terminal). That way, everything spacing-wise will look the same after you cut & paste it. Oh yeah, that bit about using all spaces and no tabs...100% TRUE...DO NOT IGNORE.

Thank you for the correction pcguyiv

I had been typing them directly into the form on this site for posting tabs and spacing them with the space bar--as you can see from my last posting (Shoofly), they don't line up well at all, even though it looks perfect prior to saving the song. I'll go try putting it in notepad or something first with a monotype font and see how that works--thanks for all the tips!

i went back and reposted "Shoofly" and "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" after putting them in Courier in Word, then cutting and pasting them to this site. it worked like a charm. thanks again.
-marc

You are welcome, Keep on posting!