About the books

For each of the books, there are two variants: the one with full musical information, plus a lyrics-only variant for singers. In addition to plain lyrics it contains bar lines to mark beat one of each bar.

The Green Book is a generic book that is used in many works in addition to work specific books, as it contains many hinos that might be needed — for example, Oração, serving hinos, Cruzeirinho etc.

A Compilação Completa has all the other books combined into one.

Navigating the Site

Each book has at least two variants represented by the cards above: the full one with chords and sheet music, and one with lyrics only. View them here or download them to your device. Alternate viewing options, links to special printout versions and audio can be found on the backsides of the cards. Tap or click the top right corner of a card to flip it around.

Through the hamburger menu in the top left corner of the page one can navigate between this page and the different books and their variants, or change the language the site is displayed in.

Viewing

This site uses a custom viewer built for displaying the songbook documents as well as possible. If you download a songbook and view it with your local PDF viewing software, please note the following:

The books are best displayed as two pages side-by-side, if screen space allows: even-numbered pages on the left and odd-numbered on the right. To achieve this in your PDF viewer, choose "Even spreads", "Facing pages (center first page)", "Cover Facing Page", or similar option. Most hinos span two pages, and the books are designed in such a way that each hino fits on a single spread.

Printing

The books are designed to be printed on A5 size (148 mm x 210 mm) paper double-sided with odd-numbered pages on the right side (recto) of a spread. This ensures that hinos spanning two pages don't require flipping of pages when playing them. The books are intended to look good as black and white, but using colour printer improves their appearance and readability, while non-black inks are used sparingly. For binding, wire binding is recommended, because it allows 360° rotation of the pages for holding with one hand, and also enables the book to lay flat and stay open when placed on a surface.

If you ask a print shop to print a book for you, provide them with the default version. They know what to do with it.

This is how 32 mm (1.25") 2:1 wire binding looks on a book with 491 pages (100 g/m² paper). The book is version 2023-12-01 of a compilação completa.

Printing at Home

You could simply print the default version of a book (single or double sided) with any printer, but most likely your paper size is bigger than A5, so you will either have big scaled up pages or pages with enormous margins, depending on the printing software settings. Also, if you try to use the print application's "two pages per sheet" option, it will by default put odd pages on the left side, which is incorrect and requires page flipping within hinos.

A better way is to download a special version for printing. These can be found on the flipsides of the cards above. Please be sure to check printout type specific information found through the icons next to the printout download links.

Contributing

The books' sources are available on Github. Contributions are welcome! If you don't find working with tools like Git, LaTeX and Lilypond appealing, you can also email corrections, comments, images, ideas, poems, prayers, new hinos, recordings, and whatever else in any format you like. Find the email link below.

If you use these books, it would be really nice to read a few words stating so in an email, to keep the motivation up for further developing them. 😊

Unilaiva Songbook

For a more generic songbook for wider tastes, see Unilaiva Songbook.