Chordown

I've abandoned this version of this project and have switched to a Rust rewrite.

My own markdown based chordsheet converter. Written in Typescript and based on Markato.

Chordown files can be converted to plaintext, PDF (using (Xe)LaTeX), OnSong and (in the future) ChordPro.

Installation

Clone the repo using ssh

git clone git@github.com:Hasnep/chordown.git

or using HTTPS

git clone https://github.com/Hasnep/chordown.git

cd chordown/
npm install # Install dependencies
npm run build # Compile the Typescript
npm link # create a global symlink

Chordown files

Header

All Chordown files start with a YAML header with these properties, required properties in bold:

• title
• subtitle
• artist
• key
• time - time signature

Body

The body contains lines of text with sections, chords and lyrics.

• Section lines begin with a hash # Chorus
• Chord lines begin with a colon : C G Am F
• Lyric lines can start with any character except a hash # or colon :, and chord symbols are positioned with carets/hats ^This is ^an ^ex^ample

Example chordown file

An example chordsheet file might look like this:

---
title: Example Song
artist: Hannes Smit
key: C
---

# Chorus:
: C        G    Am    F
  ^Example ^chor^down ^song!

Chordown config files

To convert the input chordown files to another format, a TOML config file is used to specify the arguments.

• input
  • path
• output
  • json
    • path
  • txt
    • path
  • tex
    • path
    • compile - the argument to run when compiling the .tex files
    • template - the path to the tex template file
  • onsong
    • path

If the config file is specified as a commandline argument, the arguments will override the global config file at ~/.config/chordown/config.toml.

Example config file

An example config file might look like

[input]
path = "~/chords/input/**/*.cd"

[output.json]
path = "~/chords/output/chordown-json/"

[output.txt]
path = "~/chords/output/plaintext/"

[output.tex]
path = "~/chords/output/latex/"
compile = "xelatex"

[output.onsong]
path = "~/chords/output/onsong/"