Crafting Ceremony/Wedding Booklets with the LaTeX Songs Package

As a tech enthusiast and LaTeX aficionado, I’m always the type of guy that looks for LaTeX packages for specific (and sometimes dare I say it unexpected) use-cases. This lead me to find a lot of hidden gems, but also sometimes half-working packages that wreck your project 🤣. As I lately had to do booklets for several events, I found one such gem : the Songs LaTeX package

Don’t let the old look of the website fool you, for this is a powerful tool for creating professional-grade song booklets, particularly for ceremonies like weddings, masses, or community gatherings. In this article, I’ll dive into the practicality and utility of the Songs package, and why I used it for my wedding’s booklet and plan to use it thereafter.

The reasons I chose Songs for this

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Unlike word processors, Songs ensures precise chord, lyric, paragraphs, and whole songs alignment. I know someone who made his parish’s booklet in word, and who cried his eyes out trying to get everything to “work”.

To double down on this, the package is very customizable. Using the songs package, one can set exactly the variables used to choose how verses, choruses, line breaks and page breaks are laid out. This way one can choose to minimize blank space (to the detriment of practicality because there will be more page turns) or on the opposite, minimize the number of page turns. And all of this can be done by tweaking a few variables.

And on top of that, the LaTeX foundation offers great typographic control, and every other perks I have come to love from LaTeX. Like the ability to properly insert images. I also took the opportunity to ask my wife to draw a few cute wedding drawings :

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Other perks I did not use

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There are also other reasons to use this package that I did not take advantage of. For instance this has native support for chords :

One of the package’s other standout features is its ability to generate multiple types of booklets from a single source file: lyric books, chord books, and overhead slides. This way we can generate from a single file the required documents for different groups (singers, musicians, and the audience) :

• using the lyric option (\usepackage[lyric]{songs}) : This removes chords, notes, etc. This is what I used for the wedding booklet as it creates a clean booklet for the audiences who need only the words to follow along during the ceremony.
• using the chorded option (\usepackage[chorded]{songs}) : Everything the musicians (instrument players or the choir) need will be included.
• using the slides option (\usepackage[slides]{songs}) : Outputs a slideshow and formats songs for projection on a screen (can be combined with the chorded option too !)

I did not use that since I had sheet music already printed for the musicians and did not need any slides, but I will definitely remember that should the occasion arise.

The final result

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I’ll be open-sourcing my LateX template soon so stay tuned for that 😉