Writing a guitar songbook - Is LaTeX best?
 

I am going to create some songbooks (for church) and was wondering if anyone around here has ever tackled a simalar problem.

The closest thing to what I want I have found here:

http://www.rath.ca/Misc/Songbook/

Once you typeset the songs it will generate a version with chord and with out chords.

It looks like a lot of work to typeset a whole book of songs though. It does accept chordbookpro files using the included converter. Is there a site that has Christian songs in this format?

Or is there any software that will generate chordbookpro files from the standard ASCII songs sheets most prevailant online.

Just looking for helpful suggestions.

P.S. I really wish there was a way to show the chord patterens on the side of the page for each song, but I don't know LaTeX well enough to make that happen.

If you really want to use LaTeX you could try LyX which makes making tex docs quite easy and has quite a few templates. http://www.lyx.org/

You could also try Lily Pond. It is specifically for typesetting music.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/lilypond/

When looking for Lily Pond I also found these.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/gnudenemo/

http://freshmeat.net/projects/mscore/