Chord_ii

Printing Lyrics with Chords

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Introduction

This is a description of a utility called Chord_ii.

Its purpose is to provide guitar players with a tool to produce good looking, self-descriptive music sheets from text files. You've seen an example of Chord_ii at work on the opening page of this site.

Chord_ii reads a text file containing the lyrics of a song, the chords to be played, their description and some other optional data. The format used is the so called ChordPro format. Chord_ii produces a PostScript document that includes:

Centered titles
Chord names above the words
Graphical representation of the chords at the end of the songs

Chord_ii also provides support for:

Multiple columns on a page
Index of a songbook
Multiple logical pages per physical pages (1, 2 or 4)
Configurable fonts for the lyrics and the chord names
Multiple songs inside one file
The complete ISO 8859-1 character set
Chorus marking

Chord_ii was originally written as Chord by Martin Leclerc and Mario Dorion. Chord was dreamed up (and the chord notation invented) by the authors in june 1991 after having arrived early at the Tennis court for their game and having to wait for 30 minutes. Later that day Mario had his first date with his wife-to-be. They stopped development and maintenance several years ago and apparently disappeared from the internet.

In 2007 Johan Vromans and Adam Monsen, both grateful users of the tool, found that Chord may not get lost, and after failure to contact the original authors they decided to take over the program and revive it. A long time ago Johan already augmented the program with several interesting features he needed, and he has now integrated these enhancements in the new, revived version.

In its first reincarnation, the name Chordie was used. Since this would cause confusion with the chordie.com web site, the name was changed into Chord_ii, to be pronounced as chord-ee-ee.

Copyright

The last known distribution of the original Chord program is 3.6.2 and dates from july 1995. It includes a statement that Chord is licensed following the conditions of the general GNU license, but with some additional restrictions. These restictions formed an obstacle for Chord_ii to be included in official software distributions.

In december 2009 Johan finally succeeded to track down the original authors and they agreed to create a new, GPL-only release. This release was called 3.6.4 to avoid confusion with an already existing unofficial 3.6.3 version.

Following the GPL release Chord_ii was rebased on the 3.6.4 version, making it officially and legally GPL.

Chordii

Introduction

Copyright

Chord_ii