NAME¶
chordii - Produce a professional looking PostScript sheet-music from an ascii
file containing lyrics and chords information.
SYNOPSIS¶
chordii [ option ...] [ filename... ]
DESCRIPTION¶
chordii produces a postscript document from a lyrics file containing
chord indications and chorus delimiters. The document produced contains the
lyrics of a song, with the guitar chords appearing above the right words. A
representation of all chords used in the song is printed at the bottom of the
last page.
Extensive documentation can be found in the Chordii User Guide, available from
the download page
http://sourceforge.net/project/chordii.
OPTIONS¶
- -A
- Will print the "About CHORDII..." message.
- -a
- Automatically single spaces lines that have no chords.
- -c chord_font_size
- Sets the size, in points, of the font used to display chords to the
specified integer value.
- -C Chord_font
- Sets the font used to print chords to the specified name. That name must
be known to your PostScript Interpreter.
- -d
- Generates a text chord chart of all internally known chords as well as
chords defined in the $HOME/.chordrc file. Chords defined in the .chordrc
file are identified with the "(local)" caption. The printout is
suitable for input to the .chordrc file.
- -D
- Generates a PostScript chord chart of all internally known chords as well
as chords defined in the $HOME/.chordrc file. Chords defined in the
.chordrc file are identified with a small asterisk after the chord
grid.
- -G
- Disable printing of the chord grids for the whole input file(s). The
effect can be disable for any particular song by the usage of the
grid or g directive.
- -g
- Disable printing of grids for "easy" chords. Whether a builtin
chord is easy or not has been arbitrarily decided by the authors. The
general rule was that any chord in its major, minor, 7th or minor 7th was
"easy" while everything else (maj7, aug, dim, sus, etc...) was
"difficult". All chords defined in the $HOME/.chordrc file or in
the input file are defined as "difficult".
- -h
- Prints a short options summary.
- -i
- Generates a table of contents with the song titles and page numbers. It
implies page numbering through the document. Index pages are not
numbered.
- -l
- Prints only the lyrics of the song.
- -L
- Places the odd and even page numbers in the lower right and left corners
respectively (for two-sided output). The default is all page numbers on
the right.
- -o filename
- Sends PostScript output to filename
- -p first_page
- Numbers the pages consecutively starting with first_page (e.g. 1).
Without this option, each song restarts the page numbering at 1, and page
numbers are only put on subsequent pages of multiple page songs.
- -P paper_size
- Specifies the paper size, either "us" or "a4".
- -s grid_size
- Sets the size of the chord grids.
- -t text_font size
- Sets the size, in points, of the font used to display the lyrics to the
specified integer value. The title line is displayed using that point size
+ 5. The sub-tiltle is displayed using that point size -2. The
tablature is displayed using this point-size -2.
- -T Text_font
- Sets the font used to print text to the specified name. That name must be
known to your PostScript Interpreter.
- -V
- Prints version and patch level.
- -x half-tones
- Sets up transposition to that number of half-tones. Can not be zero. All
chord names must be build in the following way in order to be recognized:
{note-name}[#|b][^/]* [ '/' {note-name}[#|b][^/]* ]
That is, a valid note name, possibly followed by '#' or 'b', followed by
other modifier ('7', 'm', etc...). Many such construct can make up a chord
name, as long as they are separated by '/'.
{note-name} must appear in the list 'A','B','C','D','E','F','G'.
- -2
- Prints two logical pages per physical page.
- -4
- Prints four logical pages per physical page.
KEYWORDS¶
A line starting with a '#' is interpreted as a comment, and generates no output.
(although all your comments are automatically mailed to the authors, and we
read them at parties...)
Directives that appear between french brackets ('{' and '}') have a special
meaning. They must be alone on a line. Blanks before the opening bracket and
after the closing bracket are not significant.
Blanks inside a directive are not significant (except inside one of the
comments directives).
Supported directives are:
- titles: type
- Selects the placement of the titles. Currently supported are left
and center (default).
- start_of_chorus or soc
- which indicates the start of a chorus (yep). The complete chorus will be
highlighted by a change bar, to be easily located by the player.
- end_of_chorus or eoc
- marks the end of the chorus
- comment: or c:
- will call the printing of the rest of the line, highlighted by a grey box
(Useful to call a chorus, for example)
- comment_italic: or ci:
- will print the comment in an italic font ... well not really. It will
print the comment in the font used for printing the CHORD names (which is
normally italic unless you specified a different chord_font).
- comment_box: or cb:
- will print the comment inside a bounding box.
- new_song or ns
- marks the beginning of a new song. It enables you to put multiple songs in
one file. It is not required at the beginning of the file.
- title: or t:
- specifies the title of the song. It will appear centered at the top of the
first page, and at the bottom of every other page, accompanied there by
the page number, within the current song.
- subtitle: or st:
- specifies a string to be printed right below the title. Many subtitles can
be specified
- define: name base-fret offset frets
str1...str6
- defines a new chord called "name". The keyword
"base-fret" indicates that the number that follows
("offset") is the first fret that is to be displayed when
representing the way this chord is played.
The keyword "frets" then appears and is followed by 6 values.
These values are the fret number [ 1 to n ] for each string [str1 to str6]
and are RELATIVE to the offset. A value of "-", "X" or
"x" indicates a string that is not played.
Keywords base-fret and frets are mandatory.
A value of 0 for a given string means it is to be played open, and will be
marked by a small open circle above the string in the grid. The strings
are numbered in ascending order of tonality, starting on the low E (the
top string). On output, a chord defined in the user's .chordrc file will
have a small asterisk near its grid, a chord defined in a song will have
two small asterixes.
At the beginning of every song, the default chords are re-loaded and the
user's .chordrc file is re-read. Chord definition of new chords inside the
text of a song are only valid for that song.
The syntax of a {define} directive has been modified in version 3.5. CHORDII
will attempt to recognize an old-formar {define} and will accept it. It
will, though, print a warning inviting you to modify your input file to
use the new syntax (the exact {define} entry to use is provided as an
example).
- pagetype: type
- Selects the page type. Currently supported page types are a4 and
letter.
This directive may only occur in the .chordrc.
- textfont: postscript_font
- same as -T command option
- textsize: n
- same as -t command option
- chordfont: postscript_font
- same as -C command option
- chordsize: n
- same as -c command option
- no_grid or ng
- will disable printing of the chord grids for the current song.
- grid or g
- will enable the printing of the chord grids for the current song (subject
to the limitation caused by the usage of the -g option). This
directive will overide the runtime -G option for the current
song.
- new_page or np
- will force a logical page break (which will obviously turn out to be a
physical page break if you are not in either 2-up or 4-up mode.
- new_physical_page or npp
- will force a physical page break (in any mode).
- start_of_tab or sot
- will cause chord to use a monospace (ie: non-proportional) font for the
printing of text. This can be used to enter 'tab' information where
character positioning is crucial. The Courier font is used with a
smaller point-size than the rest of the text.
- end_of_tab or eot
- will stop using monospace font. The effect is implicit at the end of a
song.
- columns: n or col: n
- specifies the number of columns on the pages of the current song.
- column_break or colb
- forces a column break. The next line of the song will appear in the next
available column, at the same height as the last "columns"
statement if still on the same page, or at the top of the page
otherwise.
FILES¶
- $HOME/.chordrc
- Initial directives re-read after each song.
NOTES¶
Run time options override settings from your .chordrc file. So the assignement
sequence to, let's say, the text size will be: system default, .chordrc,
run-time option, and finally from within the song itself.
All keywords are case independent.
BUGS¶
CHORDII will not wrap long lines around the right margin.
White space is not inserted inside the text line, even if white space is
inserted in the "chord" line above the text. The net effect is that
chord names can appear further down the line than what was intended. This is a
side effect from fixing an old "bug" that caused the chord names to
overlap. This bug will only manifest itself if you have lots of chord but
little text. Inserting white space in the text is a good workaround.
In 2-up mode, if page-numbering is invoked on a document that has an odd number
of page, the page number for the last page will be printed at the bottom right
of the virtual page instead of the bottom right of the physical page.
COPYRIGHT¶
Copyright 2008 The Chordii Project
Copyright 1990-91-92-93 by Martin Leclerc and Mario Dorion
AUTHORS¶
Johan Vromans <jvromans@squirrel.nl)
Martin Leclerc (Martin.Leclerc@Sun.COM *** DEFUNCT ***)
and Mario Dorion (Mario.Dorion@Sun.COM *** DEFUNCT ***)
CONTRIBUTORS¶
Steve Putz (putz@parc.xerox.com)
Jim Gerland (GERLAND@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu)
Leo Bicknell (ab147@freenet.acsu.buffalo.edu)