30 years ago (oh dear, that's got to be too long?) I wanted to print out a bunch of guitar tab from OLGA (the online guitar archive, probably kicked off the net

30 years ago (oh dear, that's got to be too long?) I wanted to print out a bunch of guitar tab from OLGA (the online guitar archive, probably kicked off the net many times since?), but that ascii format meant that when you shrank it to try to fit more on a page, you just ended up with empty space. So I wrote this https://ctan.math.utah.edu/pub/ctan/tex-archive/support/pstab/manual.pst https://ctan.math.utah.edu/pub/ctan/tex-archive/support/psta... (linking to the manual not the code - the manual is itself a program using the code I wrote to do the formatting) - a thing for formatting guitar tab that _ran on our Apple LaserWriter_, because we had pretty much nothing else that could do graphics. I learned postscript to write this, and because I needed to do some diagrams for my PhD, and wrote it in a week... so it's rough. But after the first couple of days I realised, that not only could I get it to format tab typed in the format I could type quickest, but I could get it to parse the ascii tab and reformat it to fit on a page, with nicely drawn lines not minus signs. It also does stuff like printing verses with chords annotated, chord tables, and suchlike. I recall going back to this 10 or 15 years later and the output in ghostscript was fugly, but at the time, I got a message from someone who'd used it to publish a book of banjo music in New Zealand - because it was the only thing that handled variable numbers of strings that he'd found! Of _purely historical_ interest, I wouldn't recommend plumbing the code for any insights, since like I say I was very new to the language, and the stuff I wrote in the manual with my opinions about code are fairly embarrassing. But hey, the past is past.