[sciurius]

This topic has come up a number of times under different names in different threads. This post is an attempt to summarize what has been going on so far, and to try to move forward.

Note that 'Chord Chart' is not the right term to designate what we're aiming at, but its the best we've got. And, as Shakespeare said, "What's in a name?"

The chord charts we're aiming at are a kind of matrix representation of the chords of a song, where every row contains a fixed number of measures. All rows are aligned on top of each other, making it very easy to read an play.
Tools that can produce chord charts like these include iRealPro and PlayTab. Examples of chord charts:

       

Although it is rather easy to produce these charts and import them as PDF or JPG into MSPro, they are fixed images. I would be very interesting if we had chord charts in MSPro that can be transposed, just like the chords of ChordPro songs.

To obtain this, we need to develop or adopt a simple text-based source format to describe the chord chart in some textual form, similar to ChordPro, and have MSPro do the transformation to the chord chart, again similar to ChordPro.

Currently, I know of three candidates for this. In arbitrary order: iRealPro, PlayTab, and ChordPro.

iRealPro is a proprietary format that is textual (it's a URL) but hard to write and maintain manually. It is relatively easy to implement. On the plus side, there are tenthousands of songs available in iRealPro format on the internet. It is limited to single page songs.

PlayTab is designed to be written manually, just like ChordPro, and easy to implement.

ChordPro is currently not suitable for chord charts, but some experiments are being conducted to find out if and how it could be (ab)used to produce chord charts. To be successful, the resultant files should be able to produce both the classical ChordPro style output, as well as chord charts.

My personal feeling is that a PlayTab-like format for manually writing of charts would be great, in particular if combined with the possibility to import iRealPro songs.

I like to hear your comments and ideas.