Tabbo

Professional typesetter for lute tablature, supporting renaissance and baroque lutes in French and Italian notation. Works like TeX - processes plain text .tab files into beautiful output.

Alpha

Current build: 0.1.0-alpha.3 (2026-05-23). An early alpha — expect rough edges.

Install

1. Download stable-macos-arm64-Tabbo.dmg from the latest release.

2. Open the .dmg and drag Tabbo to Applications.

3. First launch: macOS will say "Tabbo is damaged and can't be opened". The app isn't damaged — Gatekeeper is blocking it because this alpha isn't signed yet. Open Terminal (Applications → Utilities) and run:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Tabbo.app
   

   Then double-click Tabbo as normal. Only needed once.

   Alternative GUI route (unreliable on recent macOS, try the Terminal command first): dismiss the warning, open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to the bottom, and click Open Anyway next to Tabbo.

Future updates land in-app: the update modal appears when a new release is available, downloads in the background, and restarts to apply.

Saving and exporting

• Tabbo saves and exports to ~/Documents/Tabbo/. It does not save back to the file you opened — it always writes to that folder.
• Re-exporting a PDF with the same name overwrites the previous one.
• Cmd+S shows a green "Saved to ..." toast at the top of the preview pane. Export errors show the same toast in red.

Unsaved changes

• An amber Edited badge appears next to the filename when there are unsaved changes.
• Opening another file or starting a new one prompts before discarding edits.
• Cmd+Q does not prompt — but the buffer is autosaved every 30 seconds and on focus loss, so quitting and relaunching restores your work. Use Cmd+S before quitting to keep the .tab file on disk.

Multi-page scores

• The preview shows page 1 only. Cmd+Shift+E exports the full PDF.

Known rough edges

• No app icon yet — appears with the default Electrobun icon.
• Some glyphs in the live preview render slightly off vs the exported PDF (course letters, staff lines). The PDF export is correct.

Project structure

Tabbo is an Electrobun desktop app wrapping the C++ tab typesetting engine.

tabbo/
├── engine/         # C++ typesetting engine (Make build, produces `tab` binary)
│   ├── src/        # Two-pass typesetter (input → layout → output backends)
│   ├── fonts/      # METAFONT sources, TFM metrics, PK bitmaps, WOFF2 vectors
│   └── examples/   # Sample .tab files
├── gs/             # Minimal Ghostscript build (PS-to-PDF, self-contained)
├── src/
│   ├── bun/        # Electrobun main process (compiler pipeline, RPC, file/menu/settings)
│   ├── shared/     # Shared RPC types
│   └── mainview/   # Vue 3 webview (CodeMirror editor + PDF/live preview)
├── evals/          # Visual regression fixtures and goldens
└── electrobun.config.ts

Build and run

bun install            # install dependencies
bun run start          # build engine + gs + app, launch desktop app
bun run test           # run bun-side test suite
cd engine && make      # build the tab engine binary in isolation
bun run evals          # visual regression run against goldens

Production-style build:

bun run build:stable   # produces a .app and .dmg in build/

Prerequisites

• macOS with Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install) — required for the C++ engine build and the minimal Ghostscript build.
• Bun v1.3 or later.

First-time setup builds the C++ engine and a minimal Ghostscript:

cd engine && make             # produces engine/tab
cd ../gs && bash build-gs.sh  # produces gs/gs-minimal (~25 MB, cached)
cd ..

After that, bun run start builds the Vite bundle, packages the app, and launches it; subsequent runs reuse the cached binaries.

About this fork

A desktop port of Wayne Cripps' Tab program (originally mandovinnie/Lute-Tab). The C++ engine retains the two-pass TeX-like architecture and METAFONT fonts; everything around it (live preview, PDF export, packaging) is new.

What this fork adds: an Electrobun-based desktop app around the engine (live preview, PDF export, file management), a JSON layout-output backend driving the preview, a worker-mode CLI for incremental compilation, and a Vite/Vue webview with a CodeMirror editor. The engine's two-pass TeX-like architecture, METAFONT sources, and PostScript output backend are preserved upstream-compatible. See git log engine/ for the per-file change history.

Documentation

• engine/AboutTab.txt — .tab file format reference (from upstream).

End-user documentation (UI walkthrough, keyboard reference, troubleshooting) is in progress.

Credits

• Original author: Wayne Cripps (Tab v4.3.108)
• Desktop app: samrobn
• Fonts: METAFONT sources by Wayne Cripps; WOFF2 vectors derived from the same.

License

Wrapper code (everything outside engine/) is MIT-licensed. The engine/ directory carries Wayne Cripps's separate terms (free use with attribution, no commercial use without permission). See LICENSE for the full text and SPDX expression.

Issues

https://github.com/samrobn/tabbo/issues