A simple songbook created with LaTeX

I wanted to have my personalized songbook with all of my favorite campfire songs. 💁‍♂️

Also, I thought that it would be cool to make it so that a person who does not have any experience with LaTeX could add songs and build a PDF. Thus, I needed a moderately simple solution - a few, easy to use, macros to describe things such as guitar chords etc. and a simple build process. Moreover, these qualities should allow for this project to be reusable.

Like any r̵e̵a̵s̵o̵n̵a̵b̵l̵e̵ lazy person would do, before I actually started working on this repo I thought: Hey! I should find something ready to use on GitHub. Sadly, there was nothing which would work as I wanted. Still, there are some really good projects out there. I'd like to mention: tbabej/songbook and dhil/best-aalborg-songbook.

If you want to build this project on your computer you'll need:

• Some LaTeX compiler. Install yourself one of the available distributions. I happen to use TeX Live. https://www.latex-project.org/get/ is a good place to start. What's important is that you should have access to all packages used by this project.
• Make

You should add your songs to the songs folder. There you can group them in subdirectories, for instance:

├── link-songs.sh
├── songs
│   ├── 0_Folk
│   │   └── 01_Song_title.tex
│   │   └── 02_Song_title.tex
│   ├── 1_Ballads
│   │   └── 01_Song_title.tex
│   │   └── 02_Song_title.tex
│   └── index.tex

Notice the index.tex file. It is responsible for including your songs in the main document. This file is generated automatically by link-songs.sh. Whenever you change contents of songs/ you should run that script. You can do it by running:

$ make link

Once you liked your songs you can build the project with:

$ make