Thanks, John. Actually, I think the University of Virginia changed the site because they had some internal controversy over using University funds to, in effect, support other sites. Not only has the direct link API been killed but it seems one can no longer specify any desired fingering in chord searches. One fingering for a ninth chord I use a lot in jazz tunes is (for, say, an E9) 4/x/2/4/3/2 bass to treble. When I use the dictionary site now, it finds no chord names for that fingering and when I request an E9/G# at the second fret, it tells me there are no such fingerings. Too bad because this is an important fingering.

I think the site no longer generates the symbol in real time as it used to. They now rely on a library of GIF images that are indexed and just referenced in the search results. If you look at the source HTML, it's easy to see how a person could build a web site that displayed all their chord diagrams in a table format. You'd just have to go through the effort to correlate all the diagram numbers with chord names.

I also thought the Online Guitar Chord Dictionary would be a natural place to mine chord symbols so, before posting above, I saved some of the GIF images to play with. When I dropped them into a Word document and sized them so they would fit over lyrics, they became too small and distorted to be useful. They just don't scale well. Perhaps John could use them if he kept all the diagrams in a appendix and just referred to them by name on the lyrics pages.

On the other hand, PostScript does scale well. That is what it was designed to do. That's why I thought maybe the GuitarTeX site would be worth trying. I haven't tried it yet but it looks as though one could generate chord diagrams without having to download or install a TeX package and the GuitarTeX software. If John only needs a few basic chords in a few of the most common keys for his book, the GuitarTeX site could be the answer. Maybe I'll go play around with it some.

      - Mark