Makes you wanna stop and read a book.

Seal. The Cadillac of Bob Dylan song books.

News

• 12 December 2009. New version of Seal that supports Christmas in the Heart. Thanks to Eyolf for tabbing this so fast, and a merry little Christmas to all of you!
• 7 December 2009. New version of Seal that supports TTL, finally.

About

Seal fetches the chord and lyric files from dylanchords.com mirrors and converts them to LaTeX, which then can be TeXed to become a PostScript or PDF file, capable of printing.

Seal is not quite done yet, but its output is usable and some parts of it even beautiful.

Anybody willing to help is welcome: Just send me suggestions, bug reports, opinions, etc.

There's also a new Seal Wiki over at Seal's GitHub page.

Download

Download the current version of Seal. You'll need Ruby and a TeX environment. (For the later, I'd suggest TeX Live. If you're a Windows user, MikTeX might be another option, see Eyolf Østrem's Seal Instructions for Windows users.)

You'll also need a recent chords.zip file, which you can get from

There are also WWW mirrors of dylanchords.com: http://dylanchords.info and http://heiner.github.com/dylanchords/.

There is also a Git archive of the Dylanchords file at http://repo.or.cz/w/dc-seal.git. If you've installed Git, just type at your prompt

$ git clone git://repo.or.cz/dc-seal.git

Then, whenever the archive got updated, you can use the command git pull to update your copy.

There is also a Git archive of the Seal program itself:

$ git clone http://www.math.tu-dresden.de/~kuettler/git/seal.git

Usage

On my computer (running Debian GNU/Linux), I use Seal thus:

$ cd seal/
$ ./seal-convert /path/to/dylanchords
$ ./seal-tex

This generates a file called book/mbpbook.pdf.

The seal-convert program also has some command-line options, run seal-convert -h to see a list of them

If you are using Microsoft Windows, Eyolf Østrem's Seal HOWTO could be interesting for you. (Be aware, though, that the information there is not 100% up to date. It should be helpful anyway.)

A note for Mac users: If you see errors like ``! LaTeX Error: There's no line here to end.'', it could be that unziping messed up the end-of-line bytes. Try unzip -a. (Thanks to Axel Kielhorn.)

Copyright

Seal is free software, licensed under the revised BSD license (KDE-style). This means I have no intentions to stop you to use, distribute, change, or sell this software. Note, however, that you do so at your own risk.

Thanks

A list of people I'm obliged to thank, in no particular order:

• Donald Knuth, for creating TeX,
• Bob Dylan, for being the greatest living artist and writing hundreds of great songs,
• Eyolf Østrem, for tabbing them: >1500 pages of output!