Chord is software for creating staffless lead sheet

Lead sheet

A lead sheet is a form of music notation that specifies the essential elements of a popular song: the melody, lyrics and harmony. The melody is written in modern Western music notation, the lyric is written as text below the staff and the harmony is specified with chord symbols above the...

s (also known as chord chart

Chord chart

A chord chart is a form of musical notation that in addition to writing out non-embellished melody, describes harmonic and rhythmic information. It is the most common form of notation used by professional session musicians playing jazz or popular music. It is intended primarily for a rhythm section...

s) in PostScript

PostScript

PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...

 format.
Chord was developed by Martin Leclerc and Mario Dorion. This project has been inactive for several years. It was forked in 2007 to a project called Chordii http://www.vromans.org/johan/projects/Chordii/intro.html.

Features

• command-line interface
• generates fingering
  Fingering
  In music, fingering is the choice of which fingers and hand positions to use when playing certain musical instruments. Fingering typically changes throughout a piece; the challenge of choosing good fingering for a piece is to make the hand movements as comfortable as possible without changing hand...
  
   diagrams for guitar
• ChoPro/Chordpro plain text file format
• automated chord transposition
  Transposition (music)
  In music transposition refers to the process, or operation, of moving a collection of notes up or down in pitch by a constant interval.For example, one might transpose an entire piece of music into another key...
  
  
• customizable font sizes
• multiple columns per page
• multiple logical pages per physical page
• songbook creation: typeset multiple songs with page numbers and a table of contents

Example Code

{title:Wonderful Time}

{subtitle:Words and Music (C) 2007 Adam Monsen}



[C]Every[G]body, [F]let's have a wonderful time,

[C]Take it [G]slowly, [F]while you're feelin' fine

[C]One strange [E7]day shouldn't [F]take you by surprise

[C]But all right, [G]hey hey, [F]hey hey



{start_of_chorus}

[C]Ahhh [Am]ahhh [G]ahhh

[C]Ahhh [Am]ahhh [G]ahhh

{end_of_chorus}



[F]Wonderful [C]time

See also

• Typesetting
  Typesetting
  Typesetting is the composition of text by means of types.Typesetting requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner...
  
  
• List of document markup languages
• Prettyprint
  Prettyprint
  Prettyprint is the application of any of various stylistic formatting conventions to text, source code, markup, and other similar kinds of content. These formatting conventions usually consist of changes in positioning, spacing, color, contrast, size and similar modifications intended to make the...
  
  

Fork

On October 25, 2007, Chord was forked

Fork (software development)

In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a legal copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct piece of software...

since development had been stalled for at least ten years. The new project has been named Chordii and is still under active development.

External links

• Chordii Chordii Home page
• Java code for Chord 4.0
• Chordie ChoPro-formatted music search engine
• How to embed ChordPro-formatted song sheets into a wiki page
• ChoPro directives
• ChrodPro Songbook (free iOs app)
• Chordpro format
• Songbook, other software for displaying and editing stafless lead sheets
• Online ChordPro-to-HTML converter
• Songsheet Generator
• Songpress - Il Canzonatore
• ChordSmith: Free Java program to transpose chords in song sheets
• ChordPro Buddy: ChordPro for OSX