Wasted space in 2-column view?

Hey Louis, I'm curious what tools outside of WorshipTools you are using. Is there an actual ChordPro standalone app? And what other tools have you used?

Hi Ryan, yes, ChordPro is an open source standard for displaying chords over lyrics, and they have a free app for Windows, macOS and Linux which just recently received some serious updates and is now a very user-friendly way to create nice chord sheets and even song books. My workflow often involves getting lyrics and chords from places like Ultimate Guitar, converting them to ChordPro, and then putting them in WorshipTools. The ChordPro app even has a feature where you can paste in plain text lyrics with chords above, and convert to ChordPro with one click.

Of course, many apps have implemented the ChordPro standard, like WorshipTools, but the official ChordPro app, unsurprisingly, is the best implementation with the best handling of the different ChordPro directives and other features. This is their home page: https://www.chordpro.org/, and this is where you can download the app and get help: https://www.chordpro.org/chordpro/home/. You can add chord charts, music notation, pictures, etc., and there are extensive formatting options.

The other tool that I have used is called Chordastic https://chordastic.com/, it's a Windows-only app that has the best approach I have seen to simply positioning chords over lyrics. It is also able to import and export ChordPro, although it uses slightly different file extensions for the ChordPro files and slightly different interpretations of the format. It's my go-to if I have a song that I have to manually add chords to. The developers don't seem to be updating it much anymore, but you can still use it for free, or get a very reasonably-priced perpetual license to use its full feature set.

In the WorshipTools Charts app, I noticed that there are two different ChordPro interpreters that you can select in the settings. The version 1 is a bit useless for me, it tends to position some text off the visible page, etc., but the version 2 works better - my only complaint is that it splits verses across columns when in 2-column mode, and seems to ignore the column break ChordPro directives. But for my use, which is very plain chord sheets, it just about suffices.