One of the tasks I came back from my residential meeting with was to convert a series of PDF chord charts into ChordPro format in readiness for a album launch next week. The chord charts are neatly laid out and come in two formats but the PDF ones compress all the chords up and the Microsoft Publisher ones spread them out too much. It was looking like it would have to be quite a manual job to work up the files, putting the right chords in the right places.

I did a quick bit of searching first and came across a useful looking website called PDF to ChordPro. This lets you drop a PDF file onto the browser, use drag and drop functionality to properly position the chords and then export it to ChordPro. Furthermore, it does this all within the browser so nothing is uploaded to, stored on or potentially lost to an external server.

I’ve bashed through a few files tonight and will finish the rest tomorrow. While it doesn’t do an instant job, I can’t think of a faster pipeline and it won’t be too long before I can proceed with two more important tests, of loading each file into an iPad app that can read ChordPro files and playing along with the tracks to check that it lines up with what people will hear.