Looks great! Glad the xml feature can be put to use :) . I see you only use the song/artist info... that was my biggest problem with doing any multi-column support (which I still have on my list to tackle..) i was trying to fit as much data as possible + make it multi column... but this works well for those who only need song/artist. I'll see what I can do to link it up

This looks great, thanks a lot!

Hey Troy, can you make a "by song" karaoke book? often people know the name of a song but cant remember the artist name...

thx,
marty

That should also read no line breaks as well as no page breaks...

msignore: That's possible, but a by-song book is going to be many times longer than a by-artist book. It's the grouping by artist that keeps the by-artist book so condensed. You might as well use Rob's printing features for such a book, but I'm open to layout suggestions.

I'm getting an error from one of the European singles, "Peut-Être une Angine" by Anaïs. (UTF8? More like... WTF8.) Any way around that?

http://myrockbandsongs.com/pmpboarder/print-booklet/xml/1556/

ERROR FROM ROB'S SITE:
XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: http://myrockbandsongs.com/pmpboarder/print-booklet/xml/1556/
Line Number 276, Column 23: < song>< ![CDATA[Peut-￿tre une Angine]]>< /song>
------------------------------------^

ERROR FROM TROY'S SITE:
Error generating PDF: :276: parser error : Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! Bytes: 0xCA 0x74 0x72 0x65 < song>< ![CDATA[Peut-Être une Angine]]>< /song> ^ at /usr/lib/perl5/XML/LibXML/SAX/Parser.pm line 31

Rob: Your server is not sending a charset in the Content-Type header, so us-ascii is the assumed default per RFC 3023, but it appears you're sending iso-8859-1. You'll have to encode those 8-bit characters as entities (or send a correct charset) for the document to be well-formed.

In the meantime I have a stopgap fix in place, so pmpboarder, rockbandblarney, and anyone else with artists or songs with non-ASCII names should be able to print a list from my site.

I'm afraid I may have made things more complicated. :-) There are two different problems now.

I'm guessing that since you're a PHP guy, you're using htmlentities() to convert characters to entities. The first problem is that there's a difference between HTML named character entities and XML named character entities. XML defines only five named character entities:

< - &lt;
> - &gt;
& - &amp;
" - &quot;
' - &apos;

HTML defines further named entities for e.g. accented letters (such as &iacute; in Juanes' song "Fíjate Bien"), but they are invalid in XML. All other entities in XML must be numeric entities.

More info: http://perl-xml.sourceforge.net/faq/#undefined_entity

Second, I've just noticed that you're outputting each field wrapped in <![CDATA[ ... ]]> tags. These are character data fields, and XML parsers do not interpret any entities found in those fields. The purpose is to allow you to send large blocks of text with characters that normally must be converted into entities, similar to how [code]...[/code] tags behave on some message boards.

So when your side sends this:

<song><![CDATA[3's &amp; 7's]]></song>

A valid XML parser must interpret it as the literal string "3's &amp; 7's", and not what you probably meant, which was "3's & 7's". Either of these are valid fixes:

<song>3's &amp; 7's</song>

<song><![CDATA[3's & 7's]]></song>

Similarly, your side sends:

<song><![CDATA[F&iacute;jate Bien]]></song>

And this is the fix:

<song>F&#237;jate Bien</song>

More info: http://perl-xml.sourceforge.net/faq/#using_cdata

I think the roadmap for your side is:

1. Drop the use of CDATA sections.
2. Encode the five characters mentioned above to their named entities.
3. Encode all other non-7-bit ASCII characters to numeric entities.

In the PHP documentation for htmlentities():

http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php

...search the page for the string "xml" and you'll a couple of comments from people who've already solved this problem. This comment in particular is relevant (though he doesn't handle apostrophes):

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php#97215

PHP isn't my tool of choice, so there may be some newer module or built-in command for handling this stuff.

All numeric entities should work fine, but there's no need to write your own function--the guy in the last link I mentioned did.

Also, I'm seeing an extra bogus > at the end of each field, before the field close tag:

<song>Just Hang On></song>

Yep, ampersands working fine, non-ASCII characters working fine, etc. Thanks!

For Troy and Rob:

Thanks a ton for getting both sites to work well together. Rob's site is great for printing specific information for stat-crazy people (like myself), and Troy's is great for people who don't care what instruments a song has or what year it was released. Artist. Title. Period. I appreciate all the work both of you have done and find use in both tools you offer.

Now, for Troy:

Is there a way we could do three columns instead of four? I know *most* songs fit in the four columns, but every one that doesn't just nags at my OCD. I know in the grand scheme of things, there are very few songs affected by this, but even at 3 columns, your karaoke books are really short.

Or, perhaps you could wrap the text and indent the wrapped text a little more. Something like this:

Mission of Burma
...Mica
...That's How I Escaped My Certain
......Fate
...That's When I Reached for My
......Revolver

I know that wouldn't look very good, so maybe just allow users to pick 2, 3 or 4 columns? (If this option is already available, disregard, as I completely overlooked it. But do let me know where I can find it, if it is available.)

Just a thought. Thanks!

EDIT: I wonder if "I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!!1" and similar, ridiculously titled tracks would even fit in three columns...

Awesome. I kind of figured word-wrapping would be a hassle, but I thought I'd suggest something other than fewer columns.

I look forward to your next update!

Thanks, Troy! Looks great. A few other things:

1) Font size
Any chance you could let us choose what font size we want on the booklet? Rob does a percentage, which I think works well. It's obvious that anything above or below 100% is larger or smaller than your default option. I may even go back to four columns if I can still read even the next font size down. Having both columns and font size selectable really gives anyone the option to make their perfectly formatted book. Huge font? 2 columns. Tiny font? 4 columns. Sweet.

2) Page number
Could this be displayed as "Page ## of ##" or simply "## of ##"? Also, could you select alignment (left/right/center)? Also, is it possible to alternate inside/outside, for people who put front/back sheets in a sleeve? (Where it's closest to the binder or the outside corner. Like reading a book. Not sure if I'm explaining myself well enough.)

3) Omit/customizable header
It's not that I'm against advertising for these sites, but I prefer the cleanliness of no headers. If you are going to force it, could you also add a dictionary-esque header? So, Page 1 for me would be ".38 Special - Boston" and Page 2 would be "Boston - Filter", and so on. This would be the same alignment as the page number. Not sure if that's easily doable. Probably not.

4) Page for new additions
Instead of bold-facing the new additions, could we just print a page specifically for them? It would cut down on the number of times we would need to print a new book. Perhaps give the following options: 'new page only', 'bold face only', 'new page + bold face'. The new page would obviously not need to be bold faced, but someone printing the entire book may want to give the new additions extra emphasis while browsing.

5) Tricky miscellany
I'm not sure how to explain this one, or if it's possible at all. But I would like something that marks the song as containing Pro guitar/bass, keys and/or harmonies. Since the library is so scattered, it would be nice to have a hint somehow. I like that Rob's site lets you show it in a column, but seeing all the 'N/A's is really bothersome. This would only show up if the song had them. I'm thinking a simple letter before the song: P, K, H, or A for All? It could be half the size of the chose font, so you could almost make a cube out of it. PK above HA. Of course, if it is A, you woulnd't need the other letters. Again, I realize this would probably be very difficult to implement.

6) Donations
You're obviously putting time and bandwidth into this project. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to show my appreciation.

If any of this was unclear, I can try explaining it better. Otherwise, keep up the great work! Oh, and thanks for the shout out on your site. :)

You can now choose from a few different font sizes, and up to five columns can now be chosen (mainly useful for the small font size).

The font sizes are 6, 8, and 10 points. I don't think a font smaller than 6pt would even be legible.

"0" new days is now fixed. Songs purchased within one hour of generating the list were still bolded because the time on rob's server is Eastern and on mine it's Central.

In "artist" song grouping mode, the background color alternates with every artist, but a miscalculation prevented it from changing at the top of a new column when a blank line was left at the bottom of the previous column, which is done to avoid orphaning an artist name at the bottom of a column (separating it from its songs). That's fixed.

There's been a few changes to my site to support DLCQuickPlay.com. The main one that will effect users here is that address of the site has changed. The old one will redirect to the new one for now.

Hey,

i have 588 songs. your list says 591 songs because three NIN songs (Head like a hole, terrible lie and Sanctified) were doubled on the list...

apart from that:

GREAT WORK !

worked... ;-)

Rob: zorbak00's problem is that "When I'm Gone" and "When You're Young" have 8-bit left single quote characters (hex 92, decimal 146) instead of the 7-bit ASCII apostrophe characters or &#39; entities.

Looks like it's fixed now, thanks!

Getting this after trying this morning:

Error generating PDF: :1725: parser error : Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding ! Bytes: 0x92 0x72 0x65 0x20 Sugar, We’re Goin' Down ^ at /usr/lib/perl5/XML/LibXML/SAX/Parser.pm line 31

A new feature has been added: You can now group songs by genre. The "song grouping" option that already existed will further divide songs within genres.

You will need to edit your saved custom print booklet to add the "Genre" column to use this feature.

Let me know if you have any trouble with the feature.

Troy, any thoughts on the Genre Grouping issue above?

Sorry for the long delay, but I haven't been checking this thread as often as I used to.

The problem was the result of some songs not having genre information on rob's side. This is fixed now. In your case, those songs were:

The Clash - Rock the Casbah
Janis Joplin and the Full Tilt Boogie Band - Me and Bobby McGee
Limp Bizkit - Nookie
Slipknot - Left Behind
Slipknot - Pulse of the Maggots
Slipknot - Snuff
Slipknot - Wait and Bleed

So when this wasn't working for you on September 30th, and then suddenly started working again on October 5th, it was because someone had added genre information in the meantime.

Hey Troy,

Any way to rebrand so I can throw my business' name and URL up top?

I'd be willing to donate like it is available here.

This is cool, but with a little Excel-fu, you can make your own booklets with a little thing called copy and paste. Hardest part was figuring out how to get Excel 2003 to include the header on all pages. Then I took out everything but song title, artist, and genre, and sorted by artist.

The advantage here is that you can fix inaccuracies, for example if you have a specific capitalisation scheme you prefer, or if you like to turn The _____ into _____, The for sorting purposes (or not). Then you can change, e.g. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers to just Tom Petty (because, the rest is just assumed, you see Tom Petty, you know it's not just him, of course it's the whole band). And then you can remove duplicate artist names, e.g. do we really need to have AC/DC for all (18? 21?) of them? Or just the first? Or maybe we want to grey out the 2nd thru the last. So many choices, so easy to implement on the fly, change up, move around, etc.

856 songs sure uses a lot of sheets of dead tree, though. I think I printed it on 13 pages?

A new feature has been added. You can now chose to group songs by decade. The "song grouping" option has been renamed to "top grouping", and the genre grouping option moved there.

You will need to edit your saved custom print booklet to add the "Year" column to use this feature.

Nope. If you just want to use a different list of songs, the easiest way to accomplish what you want would probably be to create a second account.

Hey Troy,

Is this still being supported? I'm getting a time-out when I try generating my PDF.

EDIT: Nevermind, it worked. That was weird.

EDIT 2: I did notice that no cover sheet printed. I added a bunch of songs today and put in 90 days, 50 days, 1 day, and never got a cover sheet to print.