Using a Compatible Text Editor

  • Hello,

    I’m a guitar teacher who for years has created chord charts for my private guitar students using MS Word. I also post the chord charts on my site by exporting the Word documents as a web page. As you may know, Word creates hideous HTML this way, but at least the web pages are formatted properly.

    I recently converted my whole site to WordPress (previously only my blog was WP), and will use some other method for posting pages containing my chord charts. I’m looking for a text editor that will be quick and easy, will print chord charts for my students, and enable me to import or cut-and-paste into WordPress easily.

    Why won’t the Visual Editor or HTML Editor work? Chord charts include lyrics to songs, with the chord name placed above the lyrics, at the approximate time in the lyrics where the chord change occurs. This requires lots of use of the space bar. Neither editor makes multiple spacing quick and easy–I’m quite familiar with NBSP’s, but it takes a lot of trial and error to get things lined up.

    Any recommendations?

    Thank you!

    Rob

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
  • Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    review this WP-Snippet:
    https://wp-snippets.com/set-default-editor/

    Although you could use any text editor for this purpose, it would be too much work and too tedious to keep up. You can make a map with a text editor, but nobody would do that nowadays because there are better ways. Hopefully you will find musicians telling you how to do this easily and cheaply. Displaying text onto html pages it is difficult and cumbersome to maintain the degree of alignment you need because each user’s browser settings control the fonts being used, and you would need to prevent them from using proportional fonts with variable spacing. Do you know about jingproject.com, where for free you can download the Jing program? It can make an image from anything on your screen, and optionally save it to an online location also for nothing. So you still make your chord charts in Word if that’s your favorite method, use Jing to copy the screen into an image, then insert that image into your blog.

    Thread Starter srmaximo007

    (@srmaximo007)

    Thank you for your response, t-p. Could you clarify how this could help my situation? Neither editor works for me–setting one or the other as default seems beside the point.

    Thread Starter srmaximo007

    (@srmaximo007)

    Hi Eridout,

    Converting the charts to an image would certainly fix my formatting problems, but it prevents search engines (or users) from scanning my text. Not an option, unfortunately.

    The chord charts I’ve already posted to my site use Verdana font, at a consistent font size, and work well in pretty much any browser I’ve seen.

    Speaking of which, I’ve considered just cutting-and-pasting the text from MS Word into the HTML editor in a PRE tag. If I style PRE to match the original font, this formats everything correctly. The only problem is, I put the chord names in bold, and this styling gets lost.

    Thanks for your ideas!

    Rob

    Moderator t-p

    (@t-p)

    i think I misunderstood your question. sorry.

    That WP-Snippet will let set the default editor – Either you go with the Visual Editor, or you can choose the HTML Editor.

    Thread Starter srmaximo007

    (@srmaximo007)

    No problem, t-p! Thank you.

    I guess I was thinking the blog entry would contain both some text and the actual chart image.

    Thread Starter srmaximo007

    (@srmaximo007)

    Here’s an example of a typical chord chart. You’ll see it also has a couple tables, but I think I can figure out how to include those easily.

    Regrets, but over my head.

    Except on the subject of text editors:
    I’ve been using UltraEdit for years and years,
    liked it so much I’ve paid to register or to get upgrades multiple times.
    You can download from https://www.ultraedit.com and use it as long as you want without paying. It’s very intuitive, but also has a lot of features you don’t have to know about until you need them, including editing by column and complicated global editing.

    PS My bro who teaches guitar 2500 miles to your SSE should take a look at your site!

    Thread Starter srmaximo007

    (@srmaximo007)

    Thanks for your recommendation, Eridout.

    I’ve been experimenting with a lot of text editors over the last few days, and so far TextEdit (a Mac program) is closest to what I need. I can create perfect chord charts in TextEdit, print them for my students and save them on my hard drive for future use, and then export them to HTML (choosing the no-CSS parameter). Pasted into the WordPress HTML Editor, it looks great. It appears that a key feature is that it converts spaces to non-breaking-spaces (not the NBSP entity, but the invisible non-breaking space).

    Unfortunately, I can’t use TextEdit–need a Windows program that will run on the PC in my music studio. Any ideas???

Viewing 10 replies - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)
  • The topic ‘Using a Compatible Text Editor’ is closed to new replies.