Reproducing a Le Roy piece for Renaissance guitar in the original format

I have long admired the clarity of Adrian Le Roy's books of tablature for Renaissance guitar published in Paris in the 1550s. I wondered if I could achieve the something similar using the music processing program TablEdit.

This is the way I normally present tabs using TablEdit:

The tablature is laid out as closely as possible to standard (mensural) notation, so that it can be read either without knowing the tune or having the actual notation to refer to.

This is what Le Roy's original tabs look like. You can see how clear and concise they are.

Original at Royal Holloway College. (Permanent link: http://purl.org/rism/BI/1551/23)

Now, could I turn "modern" tabs into a similar format without losing all the benefits of the program?

Well, first I had to get hold of the fonts. I could always have written my own on FontForge, but I'm not very good at it, and that would have been rediscovering the wheel. Fortunately I found an excellent set of fonts at:
 http://www.websentia.us/sibeliusExtras/LeroyEarlyMusicPackageforSibeliusv101.zip
The accompanying notes do say that the font is not really suitable for Sibelius, but I have found that in TablEdit they are perfect. There is a manual here.

By selecting the right fonts, removing most of the formatting (stems etc) from the tabs, and using texts for the note length symbols, I managed to achieve this:

The fancy initial font is Goudy Initialen

Apart from the different page orientation, I think you'll agree that this is pretty close.

And to prove that underlying music (playable by midi) exists, here is the notation version encoded in the same file:

So, I'm feeling pretty pleased. It's wonderful what you can do on a rainy afternoon.