Since Justin advocated strongly for creating a physical book with the songs I like to play, I did that… but I wanted it to look good, and most songs I print from the internet (including the Justin Guitar page) is not very pretty. So, I used typst, a type setting tool found at https://typst.app/ to make it look better for print . I actually don’t use the page, but run it locally, but that is not important. The conchord typst package enabled me to make my songs look uniform and pretty. So far so good…
Then one day, my 10 year old daughter, came to me and showed me this song that she found and thought was really good, and told me I had to learn it so we could have a jam. The song was “Animal I have become” with Three Day Grace. Now, I have only played for 6 months, so I struggle to keep up with her (even though she played drums for less time), but I do my best. So I search the internet for some tabs for the song, and found some ascii tabs on Ultimate Guitar. But ascii tabs look awful, so I looked for a typst package to prettify it, but found none. So, when I wasn’t practicing the song, I wrote a typst tablature package for writing pretty tablatures, it is called fretwork and can be found here fretwork – Typst Universe
There are two notations, one native with the full feature set, but I also built support for ascii tabs (like the ones at ultimate guitar), they support a lot, but not really all features. And since many ascii tabs lack information, like rhythm and stuff, you can add information to them to make them render better. The quality of the tabs vary, so some of them need a bit of cleaning up before they work, but I hope most will work and render.
I thought I share it here if someone else like to convert ascii tabs to a more beautiful version.
Now, since I wrote this just to scratch my own itch, and as a side project to my side project of learning to play the guitar… I’m going to be honest and say that I will most likely not spend a huge amount of time on this. But still let me know if you find something you think is need or something that needs to be fixed.
Here is a short demo:
