chord(l) Utilities chord(l)
September 1993
NAME
chord - Produce a professional looking PostScript sheet-music from an
ascii file containing lyrics and chords information.
SYNOPSIS
chord [ option ...] [ filename... ]
DESCRIPTION
chord 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.
OPTIONS
-A Will print the "About CHORD..." 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".
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chord(l) Utilities chord(l)
September 1993
-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.
-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'.
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chord(l) Utilities chord(l)
September 1993
-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:
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.
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chord(l) Utilities chord(l)
September 1993
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 CHORD
3.5. CHORD 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).
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.
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chord(l) Utilities chord(l)
September 1993
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
CHORD 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
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chord(l) Utilities chord(l)
September 1993
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 1990-91-92-93 by Martin Leclerc and Mario Dorion
AUTHORS
Martin Leclerc (Martin.Leclerc@Sun.COM)
and Mario Dorion (Mario.Dorion@Sun.COM)
CONTRIBUTORS
Steve Putz (putz@parc.xerox.com)
Jim Gerland (GERLAND@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu)
Leo Bicknell (ab147@freenet.acsu.buffalo.edu)
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