Latex for Guitar chords and tabs

27 10 2011

I have just picked up Latex, which is usually used for writing science papers, books, compiling math / chemistry / etc. notes.  I’ve been wondering whether the songs listed on this site can be compiled via Latex.

A quick search seems promising.  There are currently a few packages online such as LaTeX Songbook style (http://rath.ca/Misc/Songbook/) and GCHORDS (http://kasper.phi-sci.com/gchords/) that seems to fit the bill.

Having the songbook in LaTeX can be quite beneficial:

  1. The songs can be compiled very easily with FULL CONTROL! on typesetting / new pages / formatting / etc.  The alignment won’t be lost so that’s great.
  2. LaTeX is very popular, so it won’t go out of date (v.s. editing it in a word formatting program which may switch to a new script after several years)
  3. Easier for me to update the songbook
  4. If you use Linux, that’s great!  You can compile (read: convert) the LaTeX document into a PDF / DVI readily.

I think that’s enough plus points!  But that means I would have to study how it’s going to be implemented long-term / manually update every song because the formatting is so different.  That would take some time.

am excited about the idea though!

Description on LaTeX: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2007/02/17/math-for-the-masses/

Advertisement

Actions

Information

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s




Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.