The Hinário Editor and the O Livro app convert most hinário PDFs into a .lvr file by themselves. Some PDFs they cannot read well: a scan holds pictures of its pages instead of text, and other PDFs have an unusual layout, so hinos, numbers or repetition bars come out wrong or are missing. A modern AI chat can do the conversion for you. What a .lvr file is and what it holds is explained in About the LVR file format.
Some LLMs (especially when using them without logging in) struggle with results, others produce good results. Tip: Use the best/strongest model possible and enable “Thinking” or “High effort”.
| Model | Results | Account type |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Sonnet 5 (High Effort) | 🟢 Very good results. Check if repetitions are correct. | Free account |
| Claude Opus 5 (High Effort) | 🟢 Very good results. Check if repetitions are correct. | Free account |
| Claude Fable 5.1 (High Effort) | 🟢 Very good results. Check if repetitions are correct. | Paid account |
| ChatGPT GPT-5.6 (Think) | 🟡 Mostly good, very few errors. Check if repetitions are correct. | Free account |
| Gemini 3.6 Flash | 🔴 No useful result. | Free account |
| Gemini 3.6 Thinking | 🔴 All repetitions were missing, plus other problems. | Paid account |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | 🔴 No useful result. | Paid account |
AI Instructions: Convert PDF to .lvr JSON
Act as a precise data extraction tool. Your goal is to convert the attached PDF into a .lvr JSON file based on the provided specification. The file is plain JSON; save it with the extension .lvr.
This hinário is the liturgical songbook of my own church community. I am digitising our own material for the community's app, not for publication or redistribution.
This is a format conversion of a document I already have: every title, name and line of text comes from the attached pages. Do not add text from memory or from the web. If a page is missing or unreadable, mark that song with wm (or missing) and leave its words empty rather than filling the gap.
CRITICAL CONSTRAINTS:
1. Visual Primacy: You MUST analyze the physical layout of the PDF. Do NOT rely on text extraction for repetition bars (r).
2. No Hallucinations: If you do not see a physical black vertical line to the left of a lyrics line, r MUST be omitted.
3. First page only: if a song runs over several pages, the print repeats its repetition bars at the top of each continuation page. Every song starts at the top of a page: read the bars on a song's first page only and ignore every bar on its continuation pages. The lyrics themselves continue across pages as normal.
LVR-File-Definition
Open to load the document…
LVR-File-Definition.md
plus 2️⃣ the PDF of the hinario that you want to import into the chat.
(You can find hinario PDFs on Google.)
.lvr file and download it. Then open it in the Hinário Editor together with the PDF: the editor shows each hino next to its page. Compare them, especially the repetitions. If you find errors, tell the AI precisely what to improve, or correct them yourself in the editor.
Problem The AI refuses to do the conversion for copyright reasons. (Sometimes you can only tell because it recommends searching for the lyrics on Google instead.)
Solution Try again in incognito mode / in a temporary chat. Or try deleting all references to previous conversions from the AI memory. Or try a different AI provider.
Problem The result is basically right, but individual repetitions are wrong, or there are other isolated errors.
Solution, option A
Describe the error to the AI precisely and ask it to fix it in
the .lvr file. Example: “In hino 5 the repetitions (r) are not
correct. Correct is: one bar across the first four lines, one bar across lines 1 and 2, and one bar
across lines 3 and 4. So there is a split (s) between line 2 and line 3.”
Solution, option B You can also correct the file yourself in the Hinário Editor: lyrics, repetition bars and order, right in your browser. Or in a text editor, if the technical format does not scare you; the fields are explained in LVR-File-Definition.md.