Lead sheets / fake sheets without score

Question

Several of the groups of people I play music with use song sheets that are similar to lead sheets, but without the stave showing the melody line:

Note that unlike many chord sheets you can find online and in books, there is a time signature, bar lines, and repeat marks. Other musical symbols are also used - simile marks, accents etc.

• Is there a name for this kind of notation?
• What software can be used to produce sheets in this format? Everything I've tried that understands bar lines, also seems to insist on a stave.

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Edit in response to comments

I realise that you can make a reasonable attempt at this format in ASCII:

 ||  C                             | C                      |
4||. Now here's a little story, To | tell it is a must.  A- |
4||. Some people make a fortune    | others earn a mint. My |

 | G                           | G               C          ||
 | bout an unsung hero, that   | moves away your dust      .||
 | old man don't earn much. In | fact he's flippin' skint  .||

However this is unsatisfactory in a number of ways.

• It's ugly; you're forced to use a fixed-width font.
• It leads to situations like this: How to read stacked chords?
• Editing is unnecessarily hard work:
  • Whenever you change a lyric or a chord, you have to realign at least one other line with spaces. More if you include the lyrics to more verses, as above.
  • You have to manage line-wraps yourself. If you've written a couple of pages, then modify the first line and find it goes wider than the page, you have to manually re-wrap the whole song which is difficult (try it if you don't believe me). Because a "line" of "score" is multiple lines of text, the text editor's wrapping feature can't help you (indeed, gets in the way).
• You have to compromise on positioning
• Symbols such as simile are unavailable, or have to be improvised in ASCII-art

Answer 1

You could use Word (or free alternatives), and separate bars with <shift-TAB> |. The point of shift-tabbing is that you can place the beginning of bars as you want, by moving the tab marks in the rulers (which you may need to activate in the "view" menu).

Select both the chord line and the text line when moving the tab marks, to make sure that they are aligned with one another.

This is also labour intensive, but I got nothing better.

An alternative would be to use excel, and to draw cell edge lines between the bars. That would make the whole song look like a matrix, though.

Answer 2

From Wikipedia:

Simpler chord charts for songs may contain only the chord changes, placed above the lyrics where they occur. Such charts depend on prior knowledge of the melody, and are used as reminders in performance or informal group singing.

I'd just call it a simplified chord chart. As to the bar lines and time signature, that might just be a modification on the notation. Most likely to assist the the performers.

As to a software for this notation, I've heard Lilypond can be tweaked to do this. I, however, have no experience with Lilypond.