[itsme]

In some cases it makes sense for me to create ChordSheets without lyrics in ChordPro, inspired by what French jazz musicians call "grilles" (French for "grid"), see e.g.
http://guitarejazzmanouche.com/grilles/4/All%20of%20me
and attached example.
Doing that in ChordPro allows transposing, if required.

[itsme]

Alas these "just chords" files are confusing the "Auto-Size Font" function. "Auto-Size Font" seems to consider only the lyrics part for its calculation so it increases the fonts to the maximum size in the settings, inserts line breaks and formats the created second line as text, not as chords. This creates a completely confusing page, see attachment.
 Definitely a bug. Please fix it, so that no addtitional line breaks are inserted. Thank you in advance.

[itsme]

An idea and a feature request connected to the above:
To make ChordSheets like this even more useful: it would be great if somehow the measure bars could be aligned to make the ChordSheet look more like a grid.
I tried to use tabs instead of blanks, without success. I'm open for other ideas, e.g. creating a kind of a table or so.
I think reusing the existing chord formatting and transposing features could keep the effort small to create a very useful extension of MSP.

[Zubersoft]

If that is a common format, I could certainly look adding a feature to line up the vertical lines. If you change the font to "monospace", they should all line up perfectly though. That's the benefit of using a fixed width font.

Mike

EDIT:

I see that even with a monospace font it won't line up correctly due to the brackets throwing off the number of spaces used for each row. While you could adjust this, that could be tedious. I'll be curious to hear if supporting a feature to line them all up would benefit most users.

[sciurius]

I you want to (temporarily?) give up the ability to transpose, my playtab tool generates PostScript or PDF charts exactly like that.
http://johan.vromans.org/software/sw_playtab.html

Mike, it would indeed be very nice if MSPro could produce charts like this. I do not see it, however, as an extension to ChordPro -- it's a new data format, and easier to implement than a full ChordPro formatter.

[itsme]

Thank you Sciurius for letting me know about your tool. The result looks nice.
But my priorities are
1.) keeping my Songs in MSPro and organizing them in Setlists and Collections
2.) allow transposing
If I gave up 1.) I could choose out of about a dozen chordsheet tools for Android, many of them preloaded with the changes for hundreds of songs
If I skip 2.) I write the chord sheet in an Office program (MS Office or Libre Office), export it as PDF and import it into MSP

[itsme]

@Mike: I already tried Monospace fonts and manual tweaking with inserting blanks. Both workarounds failed badly. As soon as transposing inserts or removes sharps or flats the manual formatting is destroyed.
What might be an idea for an easy solution in MSP could be allowing the usage of tabs. Currently MSP and some other ChordPro tools that I tried seem to replace a tab with just one single blank. If tabs had certain horizontal positions it could work and would stay compatible with other Chordpro tools

[itsme]

Inserting horizontal tab positions as something like
{hor_tab:20,40,60}
where the values represent the tab positions as percent values of the page width or as a number of blanks (in the current lyrics font) could work.
It is compatible with existing ChordPro: programs that do not know the tag ignore it completely and replace the tabs with a single blank.
@Sciurius: what's your opinion?

[sciurius]

It would be very nice if MSPro would provide support for producing chord charts. However, I fail to see how this would be possible from ChordPro without affecting the elegant simplicity of the format.
For the past 25 years I've made numerous attempts to write chord charts in existing tools. None of them could produce anything satisfactory and that's why I wrote playtab. Nowadays there are some iPad/Android tools that can produce something similar (e.g., iRealPro) but, just as you point out, you give up at least one of niceness, maintainability and transposability.
While introducing horizontal tabs and using a monospace font would give ChordPro some abilities for alignment, it will be limited and you'll become disappointed soon. For full flexibility you'll need much more control than just tab widths, requiring several other directives. To give some examples: You'll want to label sections (Intro, verse, vamp, coda, ...), add playing instructions, and so on. Control vertical spacing to separate sections. See the attached example.
Therefore I already suggested to not treat this as something to be shoehorned into ChordPro, but as a distinct data type. This would give all the added values of MSPro (e.g, organizing into collections and setlists, building indices, performance display with transpose capabilities).

As for the hor_tab proposal: it's a start but it has a couple of drawbacks. First, what you really want is columns. For example, the attached song would have 4 x 4 colums. Second, tabs are invisible and vulnerable. An editor or an email program may replace them with spaces, or you may have one tab too much or to less and you won't notice easily. That's why I use a "visible column spacer" (a period) in playtab.

[sciurius]

Having said all that, I am willing to help with a prototype just to find out how far we can stretch ChordPro and whether the results are sufficiently satisfactory.
This will allow Mike to concentrate on the current issues while we (try to) work out a more detailed proposal.
To participate, you must be able to install and run a command line Perl program, and interpret its PDF results.

[itsme]

As I started this discussion I feel obliged to offer help. And I wanted to try your MSPro tools anyway. I'll have to install Perl and so on... Alas that's not on the top position of my priority list.

[sciurius]

Installing Perl on Windows (I assume you're on Windows, since you don't have Perl) is a very easy two-click process. Just download the appropriate kit from the ActiveState download site http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/downloads , and install.
In worst case I can supply test programs that do not require installing Perl, at the cost of slowdown.

[itsme]

@Mike: there are two bugs with "chord only" files, probably connected with each other.
One is that "AUTO-SIZE FONT" does not calculate the size correctly. The second one is that the displayed result looks strange as soon as the chord font is set so large that it creates an additional line feed.

[itsme]

@Sciurius: thanks for your advice, I'll give it a try and let you know how it is going on

[Zubersoft]

I've fixed a large number of problems with rendering the file you provided. It shows up much differently now and auto-sizing is working as it should.

Thanks,
Mike