Chapter 1. Introduction

First of all: my written English isn't perfect, but I hope this text will help you nevertheless! For suggestions see the Section called Contacts in Chapter 8..

GuitarTeX is a tool for guitarists who want to print good looking and easy to play song sheets or song books from their chord or chordpro files. It uses the well known chord format with several extensions.

It is based upon an idea of Martin Leclerc and Mario Dorion from Canada and their program Chord (Version 3.5 from 1993). To use GuitarTeX, you need to have knowledge of the Chord program (explained later). Though the LaTeX text processing system is used by GuitarTeX, you don't have to know very much about it. GuitarTeX produces Postscript or PDF output automatically (if you want). The Chord directives supplied by GuitarTeX are described in Chapter 5.

Features

GuitarTeX converts a file with lyrics and chords in a special format to a LaTeX file. Here is an example input file:

{title:The Manual Song}
{st:No-one has yet claimed responsibility}
[D]I print verses [A^7]in a [D]row,
The next line gets put [A^7]down be[D]low,
Mumble mumble [A^7]rhymes with [D]grow [G]     [G#]     [A]
Done this verse, now [A^7susX]on we [quietly]go!

{soc}
[D]This is the [Bm]manual song
[A^7]No-one really knows what's [D]goin' on
[D]This is the [F#m]manual song
[A^7]And now the chorus is already [D]gone
{eoc}

[D]The second verse is [A^7]like the [D]first,
The music poor, the [A^7]verse is [D]worse,
I wrote this since [A^7]I'd get [D]sued,
If I used real songs. [A^7]This'll [D]do.

{c:repeat chorus}

The ^-sign is new for users of other Chord clones. It makes the following characters appear superscript. You can see the output in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1. Print output from example file

GuitarTeX converts the Chord format into "normal" LaTeX format like a kind of preprocessor. This may be a single song or even a complete songbook. You may as well translate your chord file directly into postscript or PDF format.

If you know LaTeX, you may edit the output file. The advantage of GuitarTeX is that you can use all LaTeX features to design a single song sheet or songbook, e.g.: packages like graphics or MusicTeX, table of contents, marginal notes, and so on.

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