<p>One of the issues, every denomination has it's own hymnal, and for non-liturgical churches, many use another hymn book, from the denominational one. The problem becomes that much of the music is a copyright arrangement's of public domain material and much of that is written in languages other then English.</p>
<p>Each translator or arranger uses different word arrangement, some add or remove verses so that there really is no standard. The hymnal publisher is really the one who should make this available in a standard format that programs like this one can read and add to the database. Unfortunately this would invariably come as a commercial product, because churches that use slides don't need as many actual books. Take a church where the avaerage Sunday morning fills 100 seats, that typically means for the publisher about 120 units sold. If they make it available as slides, you might only need 20 books for the people who really want a book. That means the loss of the profit on 100 books for the publisher. So if they make the raw text available for slide production, they would need to collect a fee for that. How do you figure out the fee, a flat fee, say $995, or per seat. Per seat is hard to figure for a growing church, but would be most fair., to the congregation and the publisher..</p>
<p>I find the easiest thing is to hunt the words down online,copy and paste, then do a line by line fixup. Once a hymn is done, it's done. If the pastor decides to add something not in the book, we cut and paste, done.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>