This is a description of a utility called 'chord'.

It's purpose is to provide guitar players with a tool to produce good looking,
self-descriptive music sheet from a text file.

'chord' read a text file containing the lyrics of a song, the chords to be played,
their description and some other optional data to produce a PostScript document
that includes:
	
	Centered titles
	Chord names above the words
	Graphical representation of the chords at the end of the songs

'chord' also provides support for 

	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
and
	Chorus marking

NEW IN VERSION 1.2

o More flexible Page Numbering
  o Left/right
  o always-present
  o an option for simgle spacing on lines with no chords
o Distinction between an unplayed string and a buffed one
o TOC generation
o Some bug fixes

Thanks to contributor Steve Putz !

NEW IN VERSION 1.1

o 'chord' supports transposition. See the man page.
o miscellanious bug fixes, including dubious coding that kept IBM and SGI from
  executing chord properly
o the grids now indicate string played open
o Error messages noe correctly report the name of the file and
  the line number where the error was found

PLANNED

o Support for tablature
o Alternate marking for the chorus


'chord' has been developped on SPARCStations running SunOS 4.1.2 and
OpenWindows 3. The PostScript previewer (PageView), SparcPrinters and
LaserWriter II have had no problem with the output. Please report any
changes your system requires.

===== COMPILING =====

chord is written in fairly portable C and should work on most UNIX
systems with little or no change. Let us know of your problems.

Simply edit the Makefile to meet your environment and 'make'

===== Amiga =====

Chord was successfully compled on an amiga system using a PD getopts


===== VMS =====

VMS port was done by  Jim Gerland (GERL...@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu)
	chord.rnh
	makefile.vms
	argproc.c

===== ARCHIVES =====

James B. from the University of Nevada (nevada.edu) has
graciously open the doors of their ftp site for archiving
songs in chord format. Look under /pub/guitar/CHORD, and be polite.


Martin Leclerc (Martin.Lecl...@canada.sun.com)
Mario Dorion   (Mario.Dor...@canada.sun.com)	
