End-to-end creation of a printed songbook

This document describes, with a step-by-step detailed approach, how to achieve the main goals of the application "Le Chansonnier". As a reminder, this goal is "generate a electronic or printed guitar songbook". So this tutorial explain all the steps to follow from an empty application to a printed songbook. If you just want to have an electronic songbook simply skip the last steps. There is also an optional step explaining how to deploy your songbook on an Android device.

The steps are:

A note about songbooks:
At the internet age, it's easy to grab zillions of songs and create very big songbooks. In my experience, it's the quality of a songbook and not the quantity of songs that made it enjoyable. The songbook content must be targeted at the group that will use it (this is the purpose of "Le Chansonnier"). Quality songs means:

Create songs

Create authors

Before to create a new song, you need to create the authors that will be used in this song. At least the singer of the song must be created because setting the singer is mandatory to save a song entry.

To add an Author:

Add song data

Before to enter the song text and chords, you must add a data about a song (Singer, title, language, creation year ...). Once this is done, you can open the "Song View" and "Song edition" panes for this song.

To add new song data:

Edit song text and chords

Now you can input the song text and chords.
Go to the Song format description to have description of what the song text should look like.

To write the song text and chords:

Alternate way: import song

Another way to add songs is to import them from files.
To import songs, simply drag-and-drop the song files on the application. The files can be in any text format and the application makes its 'best effort' to import them. If the files are song files previously exported from "Le chansonnier", then they are in the application song format (with ".sng" extension). In this case, the import process will get all the data it needs (singer, title, creation year, ...) from the song properties. Otherwise, a dialog box is shown to identify the song (i.e. set the title and singer) as displayed in the left screenshot. In this case, the rest of the data must be added later with the Song details edition dialog.

Once each song is identified, an overview dialog will present all the imported data.
Press "Ok" and all the songs are created with the imported text.

Again, if the imported songs were in the application song format the song text is formatted as expected and will automatically render correctly. Otherwise, each song text must be fixed in the Song Editor pane.
Note that the "Chord" format (text files with the ".crd" extension) is close to the expected format, so text of this type will require minimal edition effort.

 
Idenfication of an imported text

Create songbook

When you have enough songs, it's time to create a songbook and fill it with your favourite songs.

To create the songbook:

To add songs in the songbook:

Export songbook to Android (optional)

If you want to view your songbook on an Android device, first you have to install "Le chansonnier" application on this device. Then you have to export your songs in a Zip archive and copy this archive file on the SD card of your andoid device.

Why copying songs on the device instead of using 'the cloud' ?
Why copying songs on the device when there are so many other ways to disribute them using central locations ('the cloud,' dropbox ...)?
There are three main reasons:

So, it's a cheap and easy way to always have your songbook available.

To create the Android songbook archive:

To copy the "Android-songbook.zip" on your device:
Of course, this can vary a little from device to device, but the general strategy should remain the same:

Export the songbook to PDF

Creating a PDF songbook is straightforward, just use the export function.

To create the PDF songbook:

Print the PDF

Printing the PDF songbook is not under the control of "Le chansonnier" application. You have to do it from a PDF viewer application such as the free Adobe Reader application. Most of the professional print shops can also directly print PDF documents.

Here are some hints about printing: