Old Hickory - Posted - 06/20/2026:  10:40:34

It has been YEARS since I've been able to write text tab in a forum post using the "Formatted" paragraph style choice. While the tab looks correct in Preview, the posted tab NEVER has line breaks -- whether I use soft or hard returns.

Is this a Mac problem? The problem occurs in all three browsers I use on my Mac: Safari, Firefox, Chrome.

The following tab looks correct in Preview. But it does not post correctly.

What's happening? And canyou fix it?

----0---------0----------0--|-------
----------------------------|-------
-0--------0------0----------|--0----
---------------------0------|-------
------0---------------------|-------

Edited by - Old Hickory on 06/20/2026 10:47:23

BruceS2 - Posted - 06/20/2026:  17:53:07

That's pretty hard to do. The platforms often are trying to auto adjust your text, which is what you don't want. You could try a basic text editor, like TextEdit on the Mac, and when you get you tab the way you like it, Copy it with a screen capture utility (like ScreenShot on the Mac). Or why not just use the free version of TablEdit and Copy and Paste your tab that way (or save it as a .pdf)? It would end up much cleaner and readable.

Old Hickory - Posted - 06/21/2026:  06:56:30

quote:

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Originally posted by BruceS2

You could try a basic text editor, like TextEdit on the Mac, and when you get you tab the way you like it, Copy it with a screen capture utility (like ScreenShot on the Mac). Or why not just use the free version of TablEdit and Copy and Paste your tab that way (or save it as a .pdf)? It would end up much cleaner and readable.

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Because sometimes I want to write just a measure or so of tab to illustrate a point. These other steps are a lot of additional steps for that. Not talking about writing whole songs or using the forum as an alternative tab editor.

To be clear: What I'm trying to do is the actual purpose of that paragraph format feature. People used to write in-post text tab all the time.

The main thing the "Formatted" paragrah style does is force a monospace font for both text entry and display so that every character space aligns with others above and below it. Proportional spaced fonts won't do this.

I'm curious to know whether this is a Mac-specific issue or if no one can can successfully post text tab any more.