Here's the problem with existing books of Christmas carols:
- They don't have all the carols I like.
- They take up space with carols I don't like.
- They pick bad arrangements.
- They pick bad lyrics.
- It's expensive to buy enough copies to have a good caroling party.
This is a book of four-part Christmas carols that I compiled from various different sources, primarily:
- Worship in Song, the Quaker hymnal (which I learned a number of these from)
- The Oxford Book of Carols
- There's one carol that I arranged myself (El Noi de la Mare), because I couldn't find any other good arrangements.
Each carol lives in its own Lilypond file inside the carols
subdirectory. The final book is a LaTeX file (so that it can have a
nice title page, index, etc.), book.tex.
The book can be compiled in two modes: "handout" (meant to be printed one- or two-sided and stapled in the upper-left corner), and "booklet" (two pages per side of a sheet of paper; meant to be printed double-sided and stapled down the middle).
The build.sh script should take care of compiling any files that
have changed and rebuilding the book. It needs to be run in the
project root and takes one argument, handout or booklet, according
to which output you want. It dumps the final product in ./book.pdf.
If the index doesn't appear the first time you build it, run
build.sh again.
The build script relies on Docker to procure a working Lilypond installation. Sigh, but such is life in 2021.