After the installation, simply open Cantara with your start menu or the cantara
command. You will then see the welcome assistent which helps you to go through the configuration of Cantara.
Here you should choose a song repository directory where you all the song lyrics files are stored. If you have none yet, you can create an empty new folder and select it as your song repository. The assistent will suggest you to add “Amazing Grace” as an example song which you can use to understand how the program works.
After you have finished the welcome assistent, you should also adjust the font settings, the text color or the background color according to your wishes. You can do that in the Settings (Edit -> Settings). The option Spoiler next Slide will show the lyrics of the next song part in smaller font size under the current part.
Beside that, you can configure how the Meta Data of songs should be displayed. See more details in the section Meta Data.
If the configuration has been done successfully, you will come to the song selection window where you can choose the songs which you would like to sing. The search field may help you to find the one you like. Simply double-click or press enter after the selection of the song in the left list, and the song will go to the right list where you can adjust the order or remove the selected songs.
After you are done, press the Presentation button to start the presentation. You can also press CTRL+P instead.
Cantara will automatically detect at start whether you have connected a second monitor (like a second screen or a beamer) to your PC. If so, it will select the two-windows-mode automatically. You can also adjust this as you want.
During the presentation mode, you can control the presentation slides via several ways:
If you are running other programs like Libreoffice Impress or MS PowerPoint in presentation mode at the same time, you can easily switch between the presenters with Alt+Tab. When the presentation mode in Cantara gets started, it will cover the second screen and be in foreground. To move Cantara to the background, press Alt+Tab to navigate to the program you want to show up.
After you have seen the default presentation style, you might want to adjust it according to your wishes and needs. For this, you can open the settings dialog (Edit -> Settings). There you can set up the following:
Cantara offers several ways for exporting presentations so that they can be reused in an other program or for an other purpose. All the export options are available in the export menu of the main window. Generally, there are two types of exports:
The structure of the markup can be specified through a LaTeX style markup language. Go to Export -> Markup Text To open the Markup Export window.
The template language supports the following commands/environments. All of them are optional:
\header { ... }
: The header part of the document which will be shown at the top of the document. No song specific content can be displayed here as this part is outside of the song loop.\footer { ... }
: The footer part of the document which will be shown at the bottom of the document. No song specific content can be displayed here as this part is outside of the song loop.\newline
: Inserts a system default line break\betweensongs { ... }
: Defines what should be displayed between two songs (but not before the first song and after the last song). The default value is set to two line breaks (a new paragraph: \betweensongs { \newline \newline }
)\lineending
: Specifies the line ending inside the song loop (default value is \newline
)\songloop { ... }
The content which will be displayed for each song (repeated for each song). Inside this environment, song tags (see Meta Data) can be accessed via \tagname
– for example \title
for the title
tag and \author
for the author
tag. The lyrics itself a loaded via the \lyrics
command.You can save and load song selections into Cantara to share it within the organization or for preparing an event. While doing so, you have two options: