Basics | Applications | Howtos | Plugins

The songs plugin

The lino_xl.lib.songs plugin adds the notions for managing a collection of songs, optionally including scores generated using Lilypond.

Overview

There is much to say… I don’t know where to start…

Lyrics

https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.23/Documentation/notation/text-markup-commands

Multiple lyric lines

The lyric fields (currently lyrics_soprano for and lyrics_alto, other voices may come if needed) are normal plain text field with a special additional rule: if the text starts with “- “ (a dash followed by a space), then Lino understands it as an array of multiple lyrics, leading to multiple verses to be aligned with the scores.

Each verse can optionally start with a format specifier, which is a single word with a series of the following characters:

• * : use a smaller font for this verse

• + : put this verse above the scores

Fine-tuning partCombine

The satb.jinja.ly template inserts a partCombine command if two voices go to a same staff.

This can lead to suboptimal rendering. For example:

scores_tenor:
    \partial 4
    e8 e | b'4. b8 cis cis b b b2.

scores_bass:
  \partial 4
  e8 e | e4. e8 a, a b b e2.

Above output shows that the partCombine command has complex rules. One of them is that voices don’t get (automatically) combined when they are more than an octave apart.

To fix this, insert a partCombineChords before the two cis scores of the tenor voice. It recommended to switch back to automatic mode afterwards by inserting a partCombineAutomatic command:

scores_tenor::
  \partial 4
  e8 e | b'4. b8 \partCombineChords cis cis \partCombineAutomatic b b b2.

Printing booklets

How to prepare a pdf for printing it as a booklet:

$ sudo apt install texlive-extra-utils
$ pdfxup -b -kbb -nc -im 0pt -is 0pt -fw 0pt -ow -o booklet-a5.pdf publisher.Page-20.pdf
$ open booklet.pdf

NB:

• -kbb means “do not compute bounding box, preserve current margins.”

• -m 0pt causes a white page after each page (and I don’t understand why)