The tabr package provides a music notation syntax and a collection of
music programming functions for generating, manipulating, organizing and
analyzing musical information in R.
The package also provides API wrapper functions for transcribing musical
representations in R into guitar tablature ("tabs") using the 'LilyPond'
backend <http://lilypond.org>.
LilyPond is an open source music engraving program for generating high
quality sheet music based on markup syntax.
tabr generates LilyPond files from R code and can pass them to
LilyPond to be rendered into sheet music pdf files from R.
While LilyPond caters to sheet music in general and tabr can be used
to create basic sheet music,
the transcription functions focus on leveraging LilyPond specifically for
creating quality guitar tablature.
tabr offers a useful but limited LilyPond API and is not intended to
access all LilyPond functionality from R,
nor is transcription via the API the entire scope of tabr.
If you are only creating sheet music on a case by case basis, write your own
LilyPond files manually.
There is no need to use tabr or limit yourself to its existing
LilyPond API.
If you are generating music notation programmatically,
tabr provides the ability to do so in R and has the added benefit of
converting what you write in R code to the LilyPond file format to be
rendered as printable guitar tablature.
While LilyPond is listed as a system requirement for tabr, you can
use many of its functions without installing LilyPond if you do not intend
to render tabs.