TuxGuitar isn't perfect. No tab/score program is totally wonderful no matter how much you pay for it.
But TuxGuitar comes close in my opinion. It handles many instruments and tunings. It supports multiple voices per staff which I find really important for fingerstyle guitar tabs. I like to have the stems for thumb notes pointing down and the treble or melody notes pointing up. I also want the note durration independent between thumb and fingers. TuxGuitar lets me do this.
The GUI is nice and note entry seems as quick and straightforward as we could expect. Better, in my opinion, than Finale ever was.
TuxGuitar also loads and or imports the most common tab formats found on the Net (i.e., TablEdit, Guitar Pro, PowerTab) so the number of tabs you can access from TuxGuitar is huge.
You can loop sections during playback, slow things down for practice, export MIDI files, change instruments, etc. Transpositions are there of course.
It lets you build your own chord library for each tab so if you're using exotic chords you can specify them in detail and cause those diagrams to be included in the printed score.
The developers also offer a discussion forum that they actually read and answer. I've had them make improvements in the program based on my input in the forum. I like that a lot. I've donated money to their effort and will probably donate more in the future.
But I'm not really excited about the printed score that is generated by TuxGuitar. The developers know that their printed output is weak. All the pieces are there. The score is complete, it's just not as nice looking as I would like to see. But the developers have provided a workaround. Rather than spend their time and effort tweaking the output and competing directly with everything else out there, they wrote a plugin that exports the piece in LilyPond format. As a longtime LilyPond user, I thought that solution was wonderful.
LilyPond is a command line system that converts a LilyPond (.ly) source file into PostScript and or PDF. Setting up and using LilyPond will be a breeze for an IT guy. Lot's of LilyPond users have no programming experience. LilyPond's printed output is arguably the most beautiful printed music available from a computer program. The goal of the LilyPond project is to produce scores as beautiful and readable as the hand engraved scores we used before the advent of computer printed music. The appearance of LilyPond scores is highly configurable once the user figures out the paramaters to tweak. It isn't really straightforward but it's very powerful and the scores look very nice.
There is a popular and powerful programmer's editor called
jEdit that has a very good LilyPond plugin. This makes dealing with LilyPond source files and producing printed scores very easy and natural. It also gives you the ability to add any features to your printed score that TuxGuitar doesn't directly support. LilyPond will produce publishable scores or entire publishable music books that look as nice as anything in a store.
Here is a link to a PDF file of my tab of Elizabeth Cotten's tune
Wilson Rag. I made this using TuxGuitar and LilyPond. It was for a student so I didn't take the time to optimize the page appearance. It's just the raw TuxGuitar-->LilyPond-->PDF cycle. I could have fit the staves to the page better, added performance tips, removed the LilyPond credit at the bottom, etc., but didn't take the time.
It's not perfect but it's pretty darned OK and, unlike PowerTab, is still in active development.
- Dub
