Charter
Turns .chordpro
files into formatted HTML chord charts and renders them to PDF.
Turn something like this...
...into something like this!
Requirements
To use this application, you will need Node.js version 12 or higher.
Setup
- Clone or download and unzip the source code.
- Open your terminal or command prompt and change to the source code folder.
- Install dependencies
npm install
Installing the Command-Line Interface (CLI)
The charter application can be installed as a command-line interface (CLI) app that can be used anywhere in your terminal or command prompt.
npm install -g .
This will install the chord-charter
CLI app.
Usage
You can use this application to view .chordpro
files as HTML in the browser and convert them to PDF. A sample ChordPro file is included in the source code.
Command Line Interface (CLI)
Converting a single ChordPro file to PDF. By default, the .pdf
file will be saved in the same folder as the ChordPro file.
chord-charter -f path/to/chartfile.chordpro
Specifying the output file.
chord-charter -f path/to/chartfile.chordpro -o path/to/chordchart.pdf
Converting a folder of chordpro files at once. The folder will be scanned for any files ending with a .chordpro
or .cho
extension.
chord-charter -f path/to/chartfiles -o path/to/savepdfs
Option | Description |
---|---|
--help |
Show help |
--version |
Show version number |
-f , --source |
Path to file or folder of chordpro files to convert |
-o , --out |
Path to destination file. If none specified, the file will be saved in the same path as the chordpro file. |
--temp |
Specify path to the temp folder for generating intermediate files. |
--html |
Save as HTML instead of PDF |
--columns |
Use two-column format (doesn't work well with all charts) |
Advanced Usage
Converting ChordPro files to PDF
Put your .chordpro
files in the charts
folder and run in your terminal:
npm run start
HTML files will be generated in the build
folder, and PDF files can be found in the pdf
folder.
Viewing ChordPro files as HTML
Put your .chordpro
files in the charts
folder and run the following in your terminal.
npm run serve
In your browser, navigate to http://localhost:3000
.
While running, any changes made to .chordpro
files will be detected and the HTML is rebuilt. Refresh the browser page to see any changes.
Note: To stop the local web server, go to the terminal window and press
CTRL+C
.
Converting to PDF with wkHtmltoPDF
There is an option to use wkhtmltopdf to perform the final conversion from HTML to PDF. To us it, it must first be installed on your system and in your search path. For macOS, you can install this with Homebrew using the following.
Note: As of this writing, wkhtmltopdf does not support CSS columns, so a two-column chord chart format will not work.
brew cask install wkhtmltopdf
With wkHtmltoPDF installed, use the following npm command to convert all chord files in the charts
folder and save them to the pdf
folder.
npm run wk