“Sing Out Joyfully” Bk. Pīnyīn Web Material With Music for Song 63 Posted

At my Mandarin congregation’s midweek meeting this week, it was announced that starting next week, we will be switching to use the new songbook, “Sing Out Joyfully” to Jehovah (sjj).

Thankfully, an official Pīnyīn PDF file for this new songbook is now available for download from jw.org. (The short link for the new songbook, tiandi.info/sjj, has been updated accordingly.) Note, however, that the currently available official Pīnyīn PDF file only contains lyrics, and does not have the musical notation for the songs. An official version of the new songbook that contains the musical notation in addition to Pīnyīn lyrics is undoubtedly in the works, but was not available from either jw.org or the JW Library app at the time of this writing.

While we greatly appreciate the official Pīnyīn songbook PDF file that is available, the PDF format itself was conceived of in a world dominated by paper. Unfortunately, that means that PDF files are often not optimal for reading on the mobile devices that are now so prevalent among Mandarin field publishers.

Also, with past official Pīnyīn songbook PDF files, having to share limited display real estate with Chinese characters and musical notation has at times forced the Pīnyīn to be rendered in small type that can be difficult to read, especially for older people.

Material for song 63 has been posted to this resource that seeks to help with these challenges:

• “Sing Out Joyfully” Bk.
  (Pīnyīn, Music, Web)
  (proofread, mobile-friendly,
  links for getting around,
  prezoomed to use full screen width,
  easy-to-read font)
  (Info re offline viewing and printing)
  
• Short Links:
  Links ▶ Publications ▶ Books ▶
  “Sing Out Joyfully” Book Links (tiandi.info/sjj)

The above Pīnyīn songbook material has been designed to be mobile-first, so it automatically adjusts itself to be optimal for reading on mobile devices of various shapes and sizes, including tablets and smartphones. A couple of the ways in which it does so are:

• Song material automatically loads “prezoomed” to take full advantage of the width of your device’s display, so as to render the Pīnyīn lyrics in as large a size as possible.
• The typeface chosen for the Pīnyīn lyrics is one that is especially legible at smaller text sizes.

More material will be added to the above resource as time allows.

The introduction for the above resource explains why it’s good to use Pīnyīn as a writing system on its own.

The Pīnyīn lyrics in the above resource do not have Pīnyīn Plus flashcard functionality because they need to stay aligned with the musical notation. If time allows, Pīnyīn lyrics in the future may also be presented on their own, in which case they can offer Pīnyīn Plus flashcard functionality.