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Can we have the option to toggle on and off jTab? As it is right now if there are any note names in code blocks turn into guitar chords and this site is about so much more than guitar chords.

I'm not sure if jTab parses in the meta, but here is a common example where if someone isn't careful jTab screws everything up.

Notes in the C major scale:

C  D  E  F  G  A  B  C

Notes in the C major scale:(using Pre)

C  D  E  F  G  A  B  C

If the pre tags are not used, it gets ugly and irrelevant really fast and worse jTab does not show up in the preview of a post so many people post their question or answer and have guitar chords which are irrelevant to the post show up.

If this is not possible can we just disable it until a better solution is found? The pre tags are the only way to opt out and that is more of a hack then a solution.

Also as a side note I noticed today jTab does not show up on the Android SE app.

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Any tweak like this is going to take some development effort from StackExchange, and they haven't shown any indication of solving the jTab problems before we get out of beta. Other meta posts have already suggested some elegant solutions.

I'll note that for single line monospace examples, you can also use backticks `like this`.

At this point, I don't believe turning off jTab entirely would be a good idea -- we have lots of content that relies upon it, and every instance of it being applied incorrectly has one of the workarounds in place. It sucks, but the learning curve of our code blocks for new users is not the thing that's keeping us from graduating.

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  • This question had 3 posts that needed to be fixed after jTab was put back into place. I don't know how many posts have been affected by this problem, but it seems like there would be others.
    – Dom Mod
    May 15, 2014 at 15:45
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    I think we have enough users who know about the issue that when it does come up and a new user can't figure out how to fix it, other users make appropriate edits relatively promptly. There's probably the odd answer in our archives, but I'm pretty confident that an appropriate workaround has been applied in nearly all cases. That question in particular just snuck in when it was disabled. Now, the SE App issue brings up some interesting questions--the same thing happens on iOS. I wonder what Mathematics is doing about it?
    – NReilingh
    May 15, 2014 at 15:52
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    But shouldn't there be a solution instead of a workaround?
    – Dom Mod
    May 15, 2014 at 15:55
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    Absolutely. Believe me, I find this incredibly irritating, and if there was anything else I could do, I'd do it. But as a Beta site, it appears we are a second-class citizen. (Looks like Math.SE has MathJax rendering on iOS after all.) We're going to have to make do until we graduate.
    – NReilingh
    May 15, 2014 at 16:04
  • On Math.SE, MathJax only happens when you specifically mark it to with $ or $$, so that's how they handle it. I'm a lot surprised that there's no way to choose when you get jTab and when you don't. Maybe a jTab feature request?
    – Todd Wilcox
    Sep 14, 2015 at 20:35
  • One problem with how Music.SE implements jTab is that it is invoked by at least two syntaxes which StackExchange sites were already using -- and still use to this day -- for "code blocks", i.e. blocks of text in a fixed-width font with line-breaks in the input copied to the output. These syntaxes are triple-backtick and ~~~...~~~. If Music.SE was going to implement jTab, it really should have had jTab invoked by a new syntax that doesn't clash with anything else, and not invoked by any old syntax which is used for anything else.
    – Rosie F
    Sep 12, 2019 at 16:07

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