Mark -

The big problem with using the fret diagrams from one of the fonts, at least so far as I can see, is that there's no good chart of which one's which. If there's a correlation between chord names and char numbers I haven't found it. If you know the fingering you want to display, you could of course just look for the right picture, but I'm not that fluent with guitar fingerings. I have a hard time distinguishing one from another in CharMap, the usual way of doing a visual search for a character; but then I've lost a little of the "eagle eye" I had as a youth, and it may be easier for some people.

The .gif glyphs from the Chord site print ok on my LJ1200 printer, although cut down to size they sort of "blur out" in the Word display. It does get really hard to read the little characters around the edges of the chart if you cut them down to less than about 3/8 inch (25 pt or so equiv), and larger would be better; but I think you'll have the same problem of legibility even with a font. The .gif are much larger than you'd want, so reducing them at least doesn't pixilate, and I don't see any distortion (in the print) when they're resized in Word. (If you resize by just dragging the edges of the image, you do sometimes get distortion in Word, especially if you don't hold down the "lock aspect key" during the drag. If you use the picture toolbar and set size, they're usually prettty clean.)

If the stuff is pretty simple, as in just text verses with the fret diagrams, I'd probably be inclined just to put the whole thing in an image editor, and make a .jpg of the whole page - or at least of each song.

PostScript is great, and I use it a lot; but then I've set up for it. Most people (esp. that need to ask) are not going to have a PostScript enabled printer - or at least won't know they have one, so it's sort of an "all or nothing" to use it in the present task.

The idea of putting just the chord names with the lyrics, with fingering diagrams in an appendix, is probably the one most often used, just because of the mismatch in the space needed for a legible finger chart vs the spacing that's good for the lyrics. Getting 20 to 50 point characters in one line to line up (and stay aligned) with 10 or 12 point characters in the next line is not generally an easy layout. I know that the TeX programs handle it well, and there is an "easy but tedious" way of doing it in Word, but it's not an instant answer in either case for most users.

If you wanted to do a little more work, you could put the fingerings at the top, bottom, or side of each page, in a small chart, with just the fingerings for the songs on that page. The expectation would be that for a song sheet where you need to put fingerings in, you're not going to need more than a few simple ones.

John