Text Renderer

The text renderer is the simplest renderer, and the best starting point for understanding the grigson pipeline. It takes a parsed song tree and produces a .chart file as output — making it, at its most basic, a round-trip identity function: parse a chart, then render it back to text.

This becomes genuinely useful combined with transposition. You can author a chart in one key, then use the text renderer to produce a transposed version as a new .chart file.

import { parse } from 'grigson/parser';
import { TextRenderer } from 'grigson/renderers/text';

const source = `
---
title: "Autumn Leaves"
key: G major
---

[A]
| (4/4) Cm7 | F7 | BbM7 | EbM7 |
| Am7b5 | D7 | Gm | Gm |
`;

const song = parse(source);

// Identity: renders back to the same .chart format
const inG = new TextRenderer().render(song);

// Transposed up a tone to A
const inA = new TextRenderer({ transpose: { toKey: 'A' } }).render(song);

The text renderer supports all the same configuration options as the SVG renderer, except for layout (which has no meaning for text output). See the SVG renderer for the full configuration reference.

CLI usage

The text renderer is also available as a terminal step in the CLI pipeline:

cat song.chart | grigson normalise | grigson transpose --to G

See the CLI Reference for details.