Formatting song sheet line-breaks
Different formats
Using the chords and lyrics you enter for a song, the SongBook can generate chord charts or song sheets in several different formats.
When adding a song, it is a good idea to see how it looks in all the formats the SongBook can generate, in case any manual tweaking is necessary. While viewing a song, you can select different formats from the View options drop-down in the top right corner of the page.
Song sheet line-breaks
When generating song sheets with 2 and 3 songs per page, lyrics are often too long to fit in the narrow columns required for that format. When necessary, the SongBook will try to split lyrics in logical places by looking for separators like commas or periods.
To make sure long lyrics are split the way you want, add commas at natural dividing places in your song lyrics. This is usually the best way to format song sheets line-breaks, but it does mean those commas will appear in the other formats the SongBook generates.
“Hidden commas”
In rare cases, you will need to add a comma so that song sheets will be formatted correctly, but a comma would disrupt the natural flow of the lyrics. An example is the following line:
Hark! How the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own.
A natural place to split lines is after “drowns”, but a comma there would be misleading, since there is no pause when singing. In cases like this, you can add a “hidden comma” as a hint for the song sheet generator. To do this, add a comma surrounded by curly braces, like this:
Hark! How the heavenly anthem drowns{,} all music but its own.
