History of ChordPro
The original program, Chord, was written
Martin Leclerc and Mario Dorion.
Chord was dreamed up (and the chord notation
invented) by the authors in june 1991 after having arrived early at
the Tennis court for their game and having to wait for 30 minutes.
Later that day Mario had his first date with his wife-to-be, though it
is not clear whether that had anything to do with the development of
Chord.
The simple but effective file format used to describe the chords and
lyrics was quickly adopted by many users all around the world, and for
still unknown reasons these files became known as ChordPro files.
The content is written in a Domain Specific Language called the
ChordPro language, or short, ChordPro.
| Chord Version | Release Date | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0 | 1992-05-20 | reconstructed from internet archives |
| 1.0PL1 | 1992-05-28 | reconstructed from internet archives |
| 1.2 | 1992-09-03 | reconstructed from internet archives |
| the dark ages | ||
| 3.6 | 1995-03 | date from the manual |
| 3.6.2 | 1995-03 | date from the manual |
| 3.6.3 | unofficial | |
| 3.6.4 | 2009-12-30 | GPL release |
For convenience, the ChordPro language version supported by the latter
programs is set to 3, to reflect the major version number of the
implementation.
From Chord to Chordii
Johan Vromans adopted Chord in 1992 and for several
years enhanced the program for his own personal needs,
since Martin and Mario stopped development and maintenance
and seemingly disappeared from the internet.
In 2007 Adam Monsen, also a grateful user of the tool, convinced
Johan that Chord may not get lost for the public, and after failure
to contact the original authors they decided to take over the program,
upgrade it to modern standards, and release it, again, to the
public.
In its first reincarnation, the name Chordie was used.
Since this would cause confusion with the chordie.com website,
the name was changed into Chordii,
to be pronounced as chord-ee-ee.
To avoid confusion, the first version of Chordii was 4.0.
The added improvements formed the base of ChordPro language version 4.
The last known distribution of the original Chord
program is 3.6.2 and dates from july 1995. It includes a statement
that Chord is licensed following the conditions of the
general GNU license, but with some additional restrictions. These
restrictions formed an obstacle for
Chordii to be included in official
software distributions.
In december 2009 Johan Vromans finally succeeded to track down the
original authors and they agreed to create a new, GPL-only release.
This release was called 3.6.4 to avoid confusion with an already
existing unofficial 3.6.3 version. Following the Chord GPL release
Chordii was rebased on the 3.6.4 version, making
it officially and legally GPL.
| Chordii Version | Release Date | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| 4.0.0 | 2007-11-30 | |
| 4.1.0 | 2008-03-05 | |
| 4.2.0 | 2008-06-14 | |
| 4.3.0 | 2009-12-30 | GPL release |
| 4.4.0 | 2012-09-25 | |
| 4.5.0 | 2013-06-19 | |
| 4.5.1 | 2013-06-21 | |
| 4.5.2 | 2015-10-04 | |
| 4.5.3 | 2015-11-23 | |
| 4.6.0 | 2017-11-09 | |
| 2020-02-02 | Post-EOL fix for legacy packages |
Chordii development was tracked in a public repository on
SourceForge.
From Chordii to ChordPro
After a while it became clear that a number of drastic improvements were needed. While the original program was already unique in its support for some non-ascii character sets the world was moving to Unicode. PDF had replaced PostScript for printing (and viewing) documents.
These improvements, tentatively dubbed ‘Chord 5’, would hit the limits of the aging program. So Johan Vromans set out to create a new program from the ground up. He choose the programming language Perl because it is fun and flexible with good support for Unicode and other relevant features.
The result is ChordPro, a program named after the file format.
It supports almost all of the features of Chordii and a lot more,
such as native PDF generation, Unicode input and fully customizable layout, fonts and sizes.
The first release of ChordPro, an alpha version, was on June 4, 2016.
| ChordPro Version | Release Date | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| 5.000 | 2016-06-04 | alpha |
| 67 releases later | ||
| 5.980 | 2021-08-13 | development for ChordPro 6 |
| 10 releases later | ||
| 5.990 | 2022-11-03 | pre-release for ChordPro 6 |
| 6.000 | 2022-12-28 | ChordPro 6 |
| 6.010 | 2023-06-05 | ChordPro 6.01 |
| 6.020 | 2023-07-21 | ChordPro 6.02 |
| 6.030 | 2023-09-18 | ChordPro 6.03 |
Note that ChordPro 5 was never officially released, but went straight into the development of ChordPro 6.
ChordPro development is tracked in a public repository on
GitHub.
Its development follows the Release Early, Release Often approach.
Johan also established ChordPro.org as a stable home for the ChordPro language standard and supporting implementation, and a user community on Groups.io.