Tips & Tricks- Guitar Pro and Adobe Acrobat

[BigBear]

Okay, this may not solve global warming but it's a cool way to use Guitar Pro and Adobe Acrobat. Often, when Neil posts a Campfire or freebie he also posts the Charts and TAB. But sometimes he demonstrats a different chord than is on the TAB. He probably does this so that the song is accessible to more players.

A good example is the recently posted Sundown where the TAB says "E" but Neil really plays a E with no third, a kind of power chord. And then he plays a B7sus4.

I don't know about you but after a few glasses of my favorite adult beverage I can't remember my wife's name let alone what a B7sus4 looks like!!

So here's what I did. I opened the Chart that Neil posted (in .pdf format) and left it open. Then I opened Guitar Pro (6 in my case) and created a new, dummy song. Don't name it just click on Track and add a guitar track. This will give you a place to put the chords.

Then I hit "A" to go to Chords and created both those chords and added them to the newly created dummy song. When I was done I had these two odd chords and the the regular A and D chords just for grins.

When you have the chords you want, just print this dummy song to a .pdf writer of some sort, not an actual printer!!. Mine is Adobe PDF. Go to this newly printed .pdf from Guitar Pro and select just the chord diagrams and Copy them. To do this you have to go to Tools > Select & Zoom > Snapshot Tool and then highlight the area you want to copy.

Note: this doesn't work with Adobe Acrobat Reader (the free program to read files). It only works with the actual Acrobat program.

Now go back to the original Chart Neil posted and hit Paste and just let the system paste the chords anywhere. Now you can move them wherever you want and resize them so they fit. Once you do this, save this newly modified file and delete the dummy song.





This seems a little cumbersome and some of you GP gurus may have a better way to do this but this does produce a nice, clean printout of the song and the chords you want to remember later. It's much easier to do than it is to describe but if you want your song book to have the right chords this is a great way to get them on the TG Charts without having to manually cut and paste!

Let me know if I didn't explain this very well and I'll try again. :cheer:

[haoli25]

You lost me at 'Global Warming', Mr. Gore...........

[Hydroman52]

I see what you are doing . . . . makes sense and gives you a neat copy that can be printed and put in a three ring binder. One question . . . when you send it to a printer to make a paper copy (using Acrobat), do you have to select the "Print with comments" in order for the chords that you pasted to actually show up?

[thereshopeyet]

Thanks

[BigBear]

Hydroman52 wrote:

I see what you are doing . . . . makes sense and gives you a neat copy that can be printed and put in a three ring binder. One question . . . when you send it to a printer to make a paper copy (using Acrobat), do you have to select the "Print with comments" in order for the chords that you pasted to actually show up?

Not that I can tell. I just paste the chord diagrams on the original Neil Chart and then re-print it. No other changes needed. :cheer:

[BigBear]

thereshopeyet wrote:

Hello Bear

I have been doing something similar, only using Word instead of PDF creation because I don't have Acrobat on my laptop.

For example, open the sundown pdf.

File / Save As / Text..... to my desktop.

Then I copy and paste the text into Word and format it appropriately, and paste the chords exactly as you have been doing.

Note
Before selecting and copying the chord diagrams, I use the zoom to get the a reasonable size for the chord diagram.

Dermot- That's a good idea too because not everyone has Acrobat but most PC users have MS Word.

Another option if you have Acrobat is, if Neil has posted the TAB, you can get the chord diagrams there and cut and paste between .pdf files and you don't have to mess with GP. :cheer:

[Chasplaya]

I only have the free Adobe programme and I managed to do a similar process, However, I use snapshot to copy the PDF from Neil's original chart paste it to a Word document then go back and do the process Bear suggest but obviously past the copied Chord from G Pro to the Word Document. I can just see Bills head spinning lol

Oops similar to Dermots post but you don't need to use save as text you just use the snapshot tool then past to Word

[thereshopeyet]

Thanks