OpenTab 🎸

OpenTab is an open, text-based, computer-friendly format for guitar tablature.

It is designed to treat tablature as structured musical data, not ASCII art, while remaining readable and writable by humans.

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Why OpenTab?

Existing options all fall short in different ways:

ASCII tablature

• ✅ Easy for humans
• ❌ Ambiguous timing
• ❌ Impossible to parse reliably
• ❌ Loses musical intent

Guitar Pro (.gp*)

• ✅ Very expressive
• ❌ Proprietary and binary
• ❌ Hard to diff, version, or extend
• ❌ Tied to specific software

MusicXML

• ✅ Open standard
• ❌ Notation-first, not tab-first
• ❌ Verbose and hard to author by hand
• ❌ Guitar techniques are second-class

OpenTab exists to fill this gap.

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Design goals

• 🎯 Explicit timing — no spacing-based inference
• 🧠 Semantic model — notes, chords, techniques as data
• 📄 Plain text — UTF-8, git-friendly, diffable
• 🔌 Extensible — forward-compatible annotations
• 🧑‍💻 Developer-friendly — parsers, schemas, tooling
• 🎸 Musician-friendly — compact, readable DSL

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What OpenTab is (and isn’t)

OpenTab is:

• A canonical source format
• Suitable for version control
• Convertible to MIDI, MusicXML, ASCII tab

OpenTab is not:

• A visual engraving/layout format
• A replacement for notation software
• A full notation editor
• An attempt to encode “ASCII tab with metadata”

Interchange notes:

• MusicXML export is lossy; some tab-specific details do not map cleanly.
• Guitar Pro (.gp*) import is best effort and may require cleanup.

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Example

m1: | q (6:3) q (5:5) q (4:5) q (3:3) |
m2: | e (3:2h4) (2:3) q [ (4:2) (3:2) (2:3) ] q r |

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Quick start

• Open any .otab sample in samples/ with your editor of choice.
• Read the specification in spec/opentab-spec-v0.1.md.
• Explore the VS Code extension source in editors/vscode/.
• Import ASCII tabs (best effort): opentab import ascii <file.txt> -o out.otab.
• Visit the docs site: OpenTab docs.

Project links

• Specification: spec/opentab-spec-v0.1.md
• Documentation site: https://homeputers.com/opentab/
• VS Code extension: editors/vscode/
• Samples: samples/

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Repository structure

opentab/
├── spec/        # Versioned specifications
├── samples/     # Example .otab files
├── tools/       # Parsers, formatters, converters
├── editors/     # Editor integrations (VS Code, etc.)
├── docs/        # Documentation website
└── README.md

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Brand assets

icon128x128.png is used for the VS Code extension icon and the docs favicon.

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Status

• Spec: v0.1 (draft)
• Reference implementations: planned
• VS Code support: planned

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License

MIT — see LICENSE