Chord chart generator

Halifax

Howdy Mr. Zippybackflash

I'm a lowly Mac user if you need someone to test on a Mac.

Daniel

ps Your name reminds me, fondly, of a Robert Crumb character

Jack

zippybackflash wrote:

Ah, I see!

Maybe this is a question that has been addressed earlier (and please forgive my ignorance if it has) but isn't creating charts and making PDF's out of it that is done fairly easily by creating a template in Word or Excel (for Mac users: Pages and Numbers. For Linux and open-source users: OpenOffice)?

Most of the time I use Word, and for charts like that I just have a blank template that I use that I can just drag chords into and re-arrange as I need them by just dragging them between the cells.

For PDF generation I use one of the freeware PDF apps (I use PrimoPDF personally) that just shows up as a printer: When you "print" your document to it, it creates a PDF file.

This has come up a few times over the years, and to be honest I don't get it either...it seems really easy to create charts using templates like you describe--I've posted some here before--but they never seem to be exactly what people are looking for.

best,
Jack.

marciero

I might be wrong about this, but I think it is an aesthetic thing that some people are particular about, i.e., fonts, etc. You can make a perfectly good version of the above chart in Word or Excel, but it will not look quite the same. Similarly, some music notation software will try to approximate the look of the Real Book that we are all familiar with. Again, it does not look quite the same.

On a related note, there is a music typesetting program called Lillypond that is supposed to have all the best aesthetic elements of hand-notated music in a way that, say, Sibelius or Finale cannot match. It's not a point-and-click, what-you-see-is-what-you-get type of application. It's more like a language and you must compile the code. I was curious about this since I use a math typesetting program called Latex which is produced by the same collaborative and is very elegant compared to Word equation editor or other point-and-click. They are both freeware.

Mike

zippybackflash

OK... Time for a shameless plug here. But since I've gotten a lot of traffic from this forum, and some great help and feedback from the people here, I thought this would be a fair trade.

The new QwikChord program is finally finished and up for sale at www.qwikchord.com for $12.95. I would like to offer users here a discount coupon so you can buy it for $9.95.

Just use the following coupon code when making your purchase: DJANGOBOOKS


The code is good for 60 days (until 5/23).

Regarding the templates, I know there is a bit of resistance there. I even see that at work too.

People who are Office wizards have no problem with it, but for most people it seems to be an exercise in frustration as it's easy to get ~close~ to what you want, but not exactly.

I did think long and hard about adding that into QwikChord, but after looking at it, it would just lead to so many requests for very specific customizations that it seemed like it would create more problems than it solved...

symbolique

Any word on the QwikChord for the iPhone release date? It mentions Fall 2009 on your website, but I believe that is well past in the northern hemisphere (NZ here).