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Guitar chord forum - chordie → About Chordie → Printing my songbook
<img src="images/smiley_icons/icon_redface.gif" border=0 alt="Embarassed"> Hello
I'd tried to print my songbook. It's about 50 songs. But to print it, it takes more than 150 pages. How can I fix it, to get <u>one song on one page</u> including chords. Thank you for any help..
Hello andy.d,
Welcome to Chordie. I am afraid the only advice I can offer here is to edit each song and remove anything on the page that is not neccessary. As most songs I have ever printed take two pages each I think your 50 will still take 100 pages though.
I hope someone can come up with a better solution for you.
Roger
Hello andy.d - I agree with rogerguppy that it is helpful to carefully edit songs in your songbook. Most songs have all sorts of 'chaff' and 'noise' that are not needed.
When you open a song using the 'edit' button at the end of each listing in your songbook, you will see what the song originally looked like before chordie's formatting wizard does it's voodoo. The chordie formatter will automatically ignore some stuff, but other things you've just got to fix yourself. Some of these problems include:
*Double-spacing of text (lyrics should be single-spaced)
*Unecessary line breaks
*Various notations or messages intended to be helpful
*Poorly-written tabs that just occupy space
*Misplaced or missing chords
All of these space-hogging features can be easily corrected or zapped while editing. The editing can be very slow and tedious at first, but with just a little practice it get's to be very quick and easy.
I have found that printing a whole songbook is generally not desirable. Rather, I print out individual songs once I have made my editing adjustments.
Hope this helps!
I've got this song formatting down to a science. I've been doing it for years and have over a thousand tunes edited down to one page in a word document. The trick is to show chords in only the first verse and chorus and just show lyrics for the rest of the song. Then its a matter of getting the font size as large as you can and still fit on one page. That way its easy to read from about 5 feet and ya don't have to turn a page in the middle of playing a tune. It's a lot of fussing and fitting and cutting but its well worthwhile.
Hello aurelbis - Having it all on one page does have it's advantages. However, my preference is to have the chords throughout the entire song since it is far easier for me to learn to sing&play with everything all together.
I have lots of printed songs also and I keep them in 3-ring binders. I just take out the pages I want to play. Having the chords throughout is also very helpful when playing with friends who are trying to learn a new song.
There are lots of songs that fit way better on 2 pages and why not spread out and add all the chords in that case. I guess I've been playing these tunes for so long that all I need is the basic structure and some detail on the turn arounds between verses and chorus or bridge. Most songs just repeat their chord changes so I use this ::: to indicate repeated patterns. It saves space on the page and simplifies the visual pollution that gets in the way once you've learned the song.
Moonlight Mile is a good example of a repeating pattern. Its a wonderful 2 chord song so why write out all those changes when G C ::: tells you the whole story.
Guitar chord forum - chordie → About Chordie → Printing my songbook
