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.

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. Unfortunately, they stopped development and maintenance several years ago and seem to have 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.

Original Copyright Notice

The last known distribution of the original Chord program is 3.6.2 and dates from july 1995. It contains the following Copyright notice:

CHORD is licensed following the conditions of the general GNU license. You are authorized to use this program free of charge. You are authorized to distribute this program freely as long as the full source is included. You are not allowed to remove the `copyright' notices from the authors nor are you allowed to pretend you wrote it. You are not allowed to charge any money for CHORD. You are not allowed to distribute a modified version of CHORD without written authorizations from the authors. You are not allowed to use parts of CHORD in any other commercial or public-domain software. Sorry for all the negatives rules ... but we've been bitten once!

We, Johan and Adam, consider these restrictions void since the original authors seem to have given up any interest in the program.

Chordii

Introduction

Original Copyright Notice

Chord_ii