03-24-2016, 08:54 AM (This post was last modified: 04-02-2016, 06:35 AM by itsme.)
When there are two many chords for the text they are confusingly misaligned. A chord has to be displayed above the character that follows the closing bracket ]. Empty space must be inserted if necessary.
See the example screenshot: the Adim chord has to be shown above the word "her" as the text editor and the screenshot of the other program "Maj7" (it's the name of the PC program) clearly show.
This issue made me stop my experiments regarding chord sheets. A pity, it looked pretty promising so far.
At first I used dummy lyrics lines to specify the width of the measures. I used dots (full stops) because their width is close to the width of blanks and colons as markers for the ends of the measures. (ExactlyLikeYou_7)
Then I replaced the dots with blanks and kept the colons. The alignement of the measure bars did not change (ExactlyLikeYou_8)
If you like to try the attached chordpro files you can see that the bar lines nicely stay aligned when transposing adds sharps or flats so that the width of the chord symbols changes.
Then I replaced also the colons with blanks. Now MSP removes the dummy lyrics lines because they don't contain visible characters any more. That's fine, so we gain a lot of space.
But the alignment of the measure bars is completely lost. (ExactlyLikeYou_9)
MSP should calculate the positions of the chords based on the blanks on the (dummy) lyrics line, then skip the empty lyrics lines and keep the calculated chord positions.
The good thing:
If that would work as I hoped, we had a way to create transposable chord sheets that are fully compatible with every existing ChordPro program, not only MSP.
The disadvantage:
Counting the blanks is a pain. This could be improved by preparing templates so that the blanks need to be counted only once. Or, far better, some code could do it.
03-25-2016, 06:04 PM (This post was last modified: 03-25-2016, 06:06 PM by Zubersoft.)
It took a lot of work, but I've modified the code to space out the lyrics appropriately and add stretch lines to connect lyrics that are being broken up due to spacing (i.e. the re-p-eat in your example). You shouldn't have to deal with lining things up manually after the next update.
(03-25-2016, 06:04 PM)Zuberman Wrote: It took a lot of work, but I've modified the code to space out the lyrics appropriately and add stretch lines to connect lyrics that are being broken up due to spacing
I appreciate the hard work, I know it wasn't easy since I have it on my TODO for Chordii for a long time and I'm still postponing it...
But won't this change cause many songs to be formatted slightly differently, affecting annotations?
That could potentially be an issue for some songs, especially if they use chords with more characters like G0/C#, or there is a large delta between the lyric font size and the chord font size. In general, I don't believe it will cause changes in most songs if the chords aren't packed tightly together.
The issue with chords and lyrics are fixed. Thank you very much.
My question about aligning chords only is still open.
It seems that, when there are no lyrics at all, blanks stay between the chords in []. I would like to have the cords aligned above the blanks, just the same way as they are aligned above lyrics. Maybe this could be an option.
