This is a very minimal program designed for outputting PDFs of chord charts and song lyrics, including in booklet form. The format of the input files is similar to Chordᵢᵢ, and you should use it or its planned successor instead of this if you want more functionality.
This program does have some unique features, including lining up counterpoint text with the main lyrics and chords:
My other design goal was to enforce a common aesthetic in all chord charts, rather than having each song be slightly different - following the same philosophy as the LaTeX typesetting system. For example, rather than indenting with an arbitrary number of spaces, any line is either indented by a fixed amount or not indented. Chords that start before the lyrics can "overhang" into the left margin, which I thought looked better than indenting the text slightly on just those lines.
I've only tested this program on Linux. It uses the following libraries:
- libcairomm-1.0-dev
- libfontconfig1-dev
Output of some unicode characters to the PDF might not work with version 1.10 or earlier of libcairo.
Various settings can be specified in a ".conf" configuration file. Most settings inherit a default value based on one of the other settings if you do not specify anything. For example, if you set the font size of the main text ("text-size"), all the other fonts will scale accordingly.
| key | default | explanation |
|---|---|---|
| page-width | 8.5 in | Width of the booklet page, not the output PDF's pages.. |
| page-height | 11 in | If layout is 2up or booklet, there will be two pages per PDF page. |
| margin-left | 1 in | |
| margin-right | 1 in | |
| margin-top | 1 in | |
| margin-bottom | 1 in | |
| line-indent | 0.5 in | Distance that lines starting with whitespace are indented. |
| block-indent | 0.2 in | Width of whitespace when the chord downbeat is before the words. |
| title-font | chord-font | Song titles. |
| title-size | 1.2 * text-size | |
| title-base | 0.75 * title-size | |
| title-height | 1.2 * title-size | |
| subtitle-font | subtext-font | Typically used to name the song's author. |
| subtitle-size | .8 * subtext-size | |
| subtitle-base | .75 * subtitle-size | |
| subtitle-height | 1.2 * subtitle-size | |
| chord-font | Ubuntu:style=Medium | |
| chord-size | text-size | |
| chord-base | 0.75 * chord-size | |
| chord-height | 1.2 * chord-size | |
| text-font | Ubuntu:style=Regular | Song lyrics. |
| text-size | 12 pt | |
| text-base | 0.75 * text-size | |
| text-height | 1.2 * text-size | |
| subtext-font | Ubuntu:style=Italic | Comments, etc. |
| subtext-size | text-size | |
| subtext-base | 0.75 * subtext-size | |
| subtext-height | 1.2 * subtext-size | |
| number-font | subtitle-font | Page numbers. |
| number-size | subtitle-size | |
| number-base | 0.75 * number-size | |
| number-height | 1.2 * number-size | |
| index-font | text-font | Table of contents entries. |
| index-size | text-size | |
| index-base | text-base | |
| index-height | text-height | |
| line-gap | text-size * .25 | The space to insert between non-empty lines. |
| stanza-gap | text-size * 2 | The height of an empty line. |
| title-gap | stanza-gap | The gap between the title block and the text. |
| index-location | none | none / front / back |
| layout | single | single / 2up / booklet |