Hi there,
Is it really necessary to put square brackets around every chord?
To save myself some work, I always set chords like this:
Intro:
[|Gm |Cm |Gm |A |]
[|Gm |Cm |Gm |A |]
[|Gm |Gm |]
This also displays properly. But if I want to transpose, these chords don't get transposed.
However, I do need the bar lines. Do I have to put every bar line in square brackets as well? If I do that, the alignment no longer works correctly.
Do you have any recommendations?
Since you have some chords embedded into the lyrics with square brackets, then yes, you do need to put every chord in square brackets.
I've never considered mixing ChordPro formatting with a section of bar lines like you're doing. I would recommend leaving the square brackets out of that first section and doing the chord coloring and transposing manually if you need to do that.
Alternatively, you can put sections of just chords in the Chords field as shown in step 8 on this page:
https://www.bandhelper.com/tutorials/adding_lyrics.html