Transposition irregularities (android and web)

[pheldal]

I've noticed that characters outside the bracketed chords are affected by transposition. Take for example a text starting with the following line:

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A [Em]spaceman came [G]travelling on his [D]ship from a [Em]far
When transposing the initial A is affected along with the bracketed chords.

Isn't the bracket format for chords in lyrics mandatory? If so transposition should not touch anything outside the brackets.

[arlo]

No, placing brackets around chords is not required. You would generally only need to do that if you want to position your chords above the lyrics, ChordPro style.

Chords are auto-detected otherwise, but A and Am are tricky because they could be words or chords. Currently the app considers them chords if they are followed on the same line by other chords. You've found a gap in this logic by placing a chord immediately after the initial word A. I'll have to do some more work to support that situation. (Other text like "A spaceman [Em]came [G]traveling" would work fine.)

As a temporary workaround, you could change the initial A to lowercase and then it won't be transposed.

[pheldal]

Is there a list of arguments against the bracketed format for chords available somewhere? Just curious. I don't pretend to have all answers, but it appears to me that just about any way of rendering bracketed chords can be decided with per-user preferences (inline/above/brackets/no-brackets/color etc). One would obviously loose the ability to use brackets in regular text, but I've used the chordpro format extensively for about 5 years and haven't seen this as much of a problem. The current approach of trying to accomodate just about anything seems way too ambitious. You'll end up with an endless row of special cases that need handling when there is no definite separation of text and chords.

[arlo]

I should clarify that the bracketed chord format is fully supported; it's just not required. The choice to use them is yours. Here are some reasons they are not required:

1) It's easier to type "Dm" than "[Dm]", especially on a mobile device where you have to switch keyboards to get to the square brackets. Recent versions of my apps include the square brackets as shortcut buttons above the keyboard, so this is easier. But it's still easier not to type them.

2) Many people copy and paste existing chords and lyrics from sources that don't use square brackets. In that case, it would be tedious to go through and add the square brackets around all the chords.

3) Many people are not aware of the square bracket convention. If the chord coloring and transposing functions required square brackets, those people would be confused about how to use those functions.