Which Book

A tiny, self-contained web app to search the 4,893 songs indexed in The Real Book Songfinder (3.14.2016) and see which Real Book volume(s) each one appears in.

Use it

Just open index.html in any browser — double-click it, no server needed. It runs entirely offline (all data is embedded in the one file, ~238 KB).

• Type any part of a song title; matches update as you type.
• Search ignores accents, apostrophes and punctuation, so agua de beber, take the a train, and aint misbehavin all find the right songs.
• Each result lists the song title and the full name of every book that contains it.

Host it

It's a small set of static files, so you can host it anywhere:

• GitHub Pages / Netlify / Cloudflare Pages: drop the whole folder in a repo/folder and deploy.
• Any web server: copy the files to the web root.

Hosting must be over HTTPS (all the above are by default) for the app to be installable and to work offline. The files use relative paths, so a project subfolder (e.g. https://you.github.io/songfinder/) works fine.

Install as an app (iPad & Android)

This is a PWA — once hosted over HTTPS it installs to the home screen with its own icon, runs fullscreen, and works offline (no app store needed).

• iPad / iPhone (Safari): open the URL → Share → Add to Home Screen.
• Android (Chrome): open the URL → menu (⋮) → Install app (or "Add to Home screen").

Build a real Android .apk / .aab (optional)

Generating a signed Android package needs the Android SDK, which isn't required to use the PWA. The easiest no-toolchain route is PWABuilder:

1. Host the app over HTTPS (see above) and confirm it installs in Chrome.
2. Go to https://www.pwabuilder.com, enter your URL.
3. Choose Android → Generate Package. It produces a signed .aab (for Play Store) and a test .apk, plus the signing key. Sideload the .apk or upload the .aab to Google Play.

(A real iPad App Store build is not possible without a Mac + Xcode + Apple Developer account — the Safari "Add to Home Screen" install above is the supported path on iOS.)

Files needed for hosting

index.html, manifest.webmanifest, sw.js, and the four PNG icons (icon-192.png, icon-512.png, apple-touch-icon.png, favicon-32.png).

When you rebuild index.html, bump CACHE in sw.js (e.g. whichbook-v1 → whichbook-v2) so installed copies pick up the new data.

Rebuilding from the PDF

The source data is extracted from MiscRealbksongfind2016.pdf. To regenerate:

py extract.py   # PDF -> songs.json (needs: py -m pip install pymupdf)
py build.py     # songs.json + template.html -> index.html

• extract.py — column-aware text extraction + song/book parsing.
• template.html — the app UI/logic, with a /*__DATA__*/ placeholder.
• build.py — repairs mis-extracted accented characters and injects the data.
• songs.json — the parsed dataset ({title, books:[codes]} per song).
• make_icons.py — regenerates the app icons (py make_icons.py; needs Pillow).