EvoX

EvoX is a PDF songbook generator for the masses that makes it easy for anyone to create and maintain their very own songbook.

Music makes the world go round, and there's nothing better than a good jam session with friends. After creating several songbooks for jam sessions, we wanted to simplify the process and leverage programming to make it much simpler and easier.

• It makes a PDF Songbook (obviously).
• Super sexy cover page, with logo support.
• It features a super simple plain-text markup language making it easy for people to create & share songs.
• Multiple column support.
• Per song font setting and column size adjustments.
• Table of content with page numbers.

Install evox with:

$ gem install evox

Create a directory to house your songbook

$ mkdir superbook
$ cd superbook

Initialize the songbook

$ evox init

This will create 3 different directories book, cover, and songs.

Next, generate the sample song book.

$ evox generate

This will create the book.pdf inside the book folder.

To generate the book with an empty page instead of cover add --skip-cover parameter to evox generate.

Inside the cover folder there are 2 files, the config.yml and logo.png. The logo file is just an example you can replace with your own.

The config.yml allows you to adjust the cover heading, subheading, logo-size, and footer text. You can also change the name of the logo file.

header:
  top_padding: 20
  title: 'The Great Book of Songs'
  title_size: 35
  subtitle: 'Version 0.5'
  subtitle_size: 15
  bottom_padding: 50
logo:
  image: logo.png
  width: 393.5
  height: 457
footer:
  title: 'Compiled by Leonid Medovyy'
  title_size: 25

The songs are just files with .evox extension that live inside the songs directory, and are printed in alphabetical order when the songbook is generated.

The song settings are located in between the double equal signs. Font size, column gutter size and total column width can be adjusted.

==
name: Free Falling
author: Tom Petty
font: 9.0
column_width: 610
gutter: 5
==

The columns are created by placing lyrics inside double dashes.

Lyrics themselves start with spaces, and chords start with a period. This concept is inspired by OpenSong.

--
.        C    F     F     C     G
 She's a good girl, loves her mama
.     C    F     F     C    G
 Loves Jesus and America too
.        C    F     F        C   G
 She's a good girl, crazy 'bout Elvis
.      C    F         F    C    G
 Loves horses and her boyfriend too
--

--
.       C    F        F     C   G
 It's a long day of livin' in Reseda
.          C    F    F       C          G
 There's a freeway runnin' through the yard
.          C    F             F     C     G
 And I'm a bad boy, 'cause I don't even miss her
.      C   F         F    C        G
 I'm a bad boy for breakin' her heart
--

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/leouofa/evox.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.