Re: Creating a nice formatted Chords + Lyrics layout for guitar players

[Eyolf Østrem]

On 19.11.2007 (00:16), Thomas Bonte wrote:
> 
> I'm trying to create a nice Chords + Lyrics layout, formatted in the same way
> as you may see on the many websites offering ascii chords and lyrics.

I seem to remember that this was discussed some time before -- you may
search the list archive.  What I wonder is: why do you want to use Lilypond
to lay out something which is pure text? Why not just use LaTeX? There are
some packages for this purpose, such as http://rath.ca/Misc/Songbook/ which
seems pretty good.  Or even html -- it's quite good at the job too.  I say
so with several years of experience with the chord sheet business.  I run a
website with Dylan chords (http://dylanchords.info), which has one extra
feature which might interest you: a ruby program, Seal, which takes the
html files as input and generates a book through LaTeX, nicely formatted
and ensuring that pages are not broken between chord lines and the
corresponding lyrics lines. You will find a link to Seal on the address
above, and the full pdf file (3.4 Mb) on
http://oestrem.com/tmp/mbpbook.pdf.  The ruby script can -- with some work
-- be tweaked to be applicable to other collections of html based chord
sheets, as long as one uses the same css styles.

Anyway this is probably making too much of it -- the LaTeX package is
probably the better alternative -- I just wanted to point out the
alternative. 

Eyolf 


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