[pmwiki-devel] ChordPro Recipe Enhancements / Guitar Tabalature Software

[Jeremy Sproat]

On 4/26/07, Martin Fick <mogulguy at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I have installed and tried out the Cookbook/ChordPro
> recipe and was able to hack together a few very simple
> fixes to get the "chord graphs (little boxes showing
> chord fingerings)" to work.  Primarily, I put a Keep()
> around the entire output.  Secondly I wrapped a <pre>
> around the chordblocks themselves so that a block does
> not appear all on one line.  These are simple fixes,
> bu maybe Sproaticus can do a better job of properly
> adding these suggestions to his recipe since he is
> more familiar with it?

I apologize for not keeping the ChordPro parser up-to-date.  Between a
new job and new family, I haven't had much time to work on it of late.
 Unfortunately, that is my excuse from almost exactly one year ago.
(see the bottom of http://pmichaud.com/wiki/Cookbook/ChordPro )  Truth
be told, since my job is almost exclusively in Python and Javascript,
I haven't touched PHP or this recipe in almost a year.

If anyone wants to take ownership of this project, they have my full blessing.

> Also, I am interested in replacing these text based
> chordblocks with graphical ones, does anyone have any
> suggestions as to a libre software program that could
> help with this?

I was looking into using the GD image library, which may or may not be
supported on your webhost.  (See http://us.php.net/gd for API docs.)

The basic idea is this:  instead of an ASCII-formatted chord diagram,
the ChordPro script provides a URL to a PHP/GD-based script, e.g.
chorddiagram.php -

    a href="/wiki/cookbook/chordpro/chorddiagram.php?chord=G320033"

chorddiagram.php will generate the file /wiki/pub/chordpro/G320033.png
(if necessary) then either 302 redirect to it or stream it back to the
browser.  It would also use a user-provided dictionary so that e.g.
chorddiagram.php?chord=G will fetch the file G320033.png (or
G355433.png if you prefer since it's up to the user.)  For extra
credit, this custom chord dictionary could be parsed from a wiki page
consisting of {define} directives.

That's the easy part.  The hard part is writing and testing the thing.  :-)

Jeremy