fonts

we have our own fonts to display chords, each chord is a glyph

birdfont

we use the birdfont tool to edit the fonts. This tool has a commercial and a SIL open font license, that you can use for free.

capture fonts

use birdfont to load and modify a font.

all glyphs cannot be in one font, so we split them in three fonts :

1. software/fonts/songbook.birdfont : the fonts for chords
2. sofware/fonts/songbook_flat.birdfont : the fonts for flat chords
3. software/fonts/songbook_sharp.birdfont : the fonts for chords

For each font, we have, from letter A :

• major chords (A => G)
• minor chords (H => N)
• 7 chords ( O => U )
• minor 7 chords ( V => b )
• 7 major chords ( c => i )
• diminished chords ( j => p )
• suspended chords ( q => w )

export fonts

use (Ctrl-e) menu (export fonts), it will export the fonts to ttf files.

make them available

the pdf generator lualatex will look for additional fonts in $HOME/.fonts, so copy the ttf files there. Other tools like LibreOffice may look for the fonts in other locations, read the doc for these tools

code generator

the mapping between chords and fonts is done in software/others/texfiles/chords.tex. if you change the organization of chords/glyphs/fonts, don't forget to update this file

For instance, we have for D flat 7 :

\newcommand\chordDfsept{{\songbookfontflat\fontsize{18pt}{18pt}\selectfont R ~ }}

This is the songbook_flat font, so using letter R in our example we will have the wanted glyph :

@todo : finish writing the fonts

We use the same mechanism for the pause and repeat glyphs.