Singing The Faith Importer

JohnLines

The Methodist Church of Great Britain authorised a new Hymn book called Singing The Faith in 2011. Some of the words are revised from those in Hymns and Psalms, so it is important to be projecting the expected words. There is an electronic version available from Hymnview.com, which runs only on Windows and needs a licence key to activate. It only produces output as Text, RTF, Word and PowerPoint, of which the most useful version from an OpenLP point of view is Text.

The Text files it produces are fairly basic, although the Song Import Wizard - using the Generic Document/Presentation importer makes a fairly good job of many of them.

I have started a Singing The Faith Importer, following https://wiki.openlp.org/Development:Song_Importer_Developers_Guide

The plan is to deal with simple cases simply using the exported text files, and to add heuristics via a hints file to deal with all the cases where the import fails.

tgc

Hi John!

Great to hear that you have started looking into this! We love contributions

Do note that the guide you're looking at is a tad old, so it might not be 100% accurate.

If you haven't done so already, I would recommend that you check out the code from the current development branch so that you don't get surprises when trying to add it later.

JohnLines

OK, I have checked out the development branch, and got it running in my Debian unstable test VM, with python3-pyqt5.qtwebengine from experimental, and other python3 packages from sid. My importer, which I copied and updated a little from my main system running Buster, with the packaged openlp (replacing importer.py and adding singingthefaith.py) now runs with the development code. I have not used Bazaar before, so not sure where to put my updates so they dont interfere with the main trunk (I assume there is some equivalent of a git fork and merge). I could add some description to the wiki.openlp.org page to describe the hints file and importer if that would be useful

raoul

Bazaar is like a simpler version of Git. This should help you with how Bazaar works: https://bzrinit.com/ Then just use the wiki to guide you through how to contribute.

JohnLines

I have uploaded current work in progress to https://code.launchpad.net/~john+ubuntu-g/openlp/singingthefaith

It works for a percentage of Singing The Faith songs, but the test fails, even though importing the test Hymn looks OK when imported into OpenLP and appears to project OK..

tgc

Good to see progress on this! Maybe you should propose a merge request to start the review process?