Hymnbooks

What a hymnbook is

A hymnbook is a running order you print: a set of songs in a sequence, with a cover, a contents page and page numbers, exported as one file.

It is not a folder, and the difference matters more than it sounds:

	Folder	Hymnbook
What it answers	”Where is this song filed?"	"What are we singing, in what order?”
A song can be in	one	as many as you like
Has an order	no	yes — that’s the point
Adding a song	moves it there	leaves it exactly where it is

So a song can live in your Christmas folder and appear in the Carol Service, Midnight Mass and Schools Concert hymnbooks at the same time, without being duplicated or moved.

Making one

There are two ways to start a hymnbook, and both put the songs in as the book is made.

From My Scores. Tick the scores you want, with the box at the top right of each card or with Select all. A bar appears at the bottom of the page: choose Make a hymnbook from these, give the book a name, and press Create hymnbook. The songs go in the order your library is showing them, so sort the library first if you want a particular order. Nothing is moved: every score stays in the folder it was in. Searching, or opening another folder, clears the ticks, so tick within one view. You can add more songs once the book is open.

From the Hymnbooks page. Hymnbooks is in the top navigation, next to My Scores. It is its own page, because a hymnbook is something you print rather than a way of filing a score. New hymnbook asks for a name, and Choose songs then lists your scores. Tick the ones for this book (the search box finds a song by title or composer, and keeps your ticks) and press Create hymnbook. The songs go in the order you tick them. While nothing is ticked, Create empty is there if you would rather start with no songs.

Either way the book opens as soon as it is made. A book with no songs says so at the top of its own page, with an Add songs button that opens the same list.

Changing what is in it

Once a book is open:

• Add songs picks more from your library.
• Add a text page puts a page of your own words between the songs: a foreword, an order of service, a note for the choir. A text page holds up to 8,000 characters, about one printed page, and the box counts them as you write.
• The ↑ ↓ buttons on each row move it. You can also drag a card from your library onto a hymnbook: start dragging in My Scores and your books appear under the folders as drop targets. Dropping there adds the song to the book and leaves it in its folder — dropping on a folder moves it.
• New page on a row decides whether that item starts a fresh page. Songs do by default; turn it off to let two short hymns share a side.

A hymnbook holds up to 60 items. If you tick, or drag, more than a book has room for, DomiSol says so and adds nothing, rather than making a book that is quietly missing some: untick a few and try again.

Cover, contents and page numbers

The three toggles at the top of the book control its chrome:

• Cover page: a title page from the book’s title, subtitle, compiler and date line. The compiler field is for the church or choir. The title, subtitle and compiler take up to 120 characters each, and the date line 80.
• Contents page: every item listed in order with the page it starts on. The numbers are worked out from the finished layout, so they are the real page numbers, not an estimate.
• Page numbers: running numbers in the bottom corner of every page of the PDF. The box beside it, starting at, is the number the first page carries (the cover, when there is one), so a book that continues another, or reprints part of your hymnal, can keep its own page numbers. The contents page counts from the same number. In the Word version, use Word’s own Insert → Page Number.

Printing the book

Export book gives you two formats:

Format	What you get
Hymnbook PDF	The whole book — cover, contents, every song — ready to print
Hymnbook (Word)	A .docx: music as images, all the text editable

Page setup… on the hymnbook sets the paper for the whole book: size, orientation, margins, music size, lyrics size and font. It governs every song in it, even songs that have a page setup of their own. That is deliberate: a book whose third hymn printed a third larger than its fourth would not read as one book.

The Word version does not compute contents page numbers. Word repaginates as soon as you change anything, so a number written in would be wrong almost immediately — use Word’s own Insert → Table of Contents if you need numbers that follow your edits. The PDF, which cannot re-flow, is where the computed numbers belong.

If a song goes missing

If you delete a song from your library while it is still in a hymnbook, the book shows that row as missing rather than quietly dropping it — so you find out before you print, not after. Remove the row and the rest of the book is unaffected.

Where to go next

• Sharing and exporting — page setup, and the exports for a single song.
• Lyrics and parts — verses, which the hymn-sheet layout writes out below the music.