[wthalliii]

I use a Surface Pro for my music. I think it's a good compromise between being large enough to read the music with my aging eyes and being small enough to carry around. But, the fairly small screen size, 12.3", makes it necessary to carefully crop the music to optimize how readable the screen is. I have found that if I crop the music so that the visible part is close to the aspect ratio of the screen, that makes the music the largest it can be. What works best for many songs is to just crop the sides as much as I can and not crop the top and bottom. But other songs require more creative cropping, and sometimes I have to use an external editor such as Photoshop to make further adjustments.

Perhaps others have similar concerns. I'd like to suggest some changes to the crop function. I have not done any Windows programming for years, and of course I have no idea of how your code works, so I don't know how hard it would be to make these additions. So bear that in mind. Also, I sometimes struggle with trying to do something with MobileSheets for a while, and then I discover you already have provided a method for doing what I need, but I just haven't found it. So that may apply.

Here's my suggested changes.

SPECIFY HOW CLOSE TO CROP EACH SIDE

Since I'd like to crop as close as possible on the sides and not crop on the top and bottom, perhaps a way to do this would be to allow us to specify how many pixels to allow outside the printed content, and specify 0 pixels to mean to not crop on that side. So I might, for my needs, specify 0 for the top and bottom, and maybe 10 for the left and right. And then, perhaps, you could apply these margins when an option is chosen. A "custom crop" option, perhaps. I realize that one of the difficulties of doing this is detecting what is truly music, and what is noise.

ASPECT RATIO

It would be handy when doing a manual crop to have the aspect ratio of the crop displayed real time. That would make it a lot easier to adjust the crop to 16:9 or 4:3 or whatever the target screen aspect ratio is. And, if it's just not practical for you to implement the first suggestion to allow specification of how close to crop, perhaps another useful thing might be to allow the specification of the aspect ratio of the auto crop. That wouldn't be as useful, but would help.

OPEN SONG FOLDER

Often, after I see the song on the MobileSheets screen, I see that I might need to use an external editor on the music. I know how to find the folder where the sheet music is, but it would be really nice to have a menu option that would open that folder in windows explorer. That could be in the Edit Song screen, perhaps on the Files page. An "Open song folder" button down there by the crop buttons.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and for considering my ideas.

[Zubersoft]

Your first suggestion would only really make sense for the automatic cropping feature. Is that what you envision it being used for? Did you want that to apply when the automatic cropping is used while importing a new file, or do you envision that being used mainly while manually cropping? I'm not sure if a single numeric value is sufficient because some users may want to specify a 0 pixel margin while still cropping every side, and I'm not sure if a value of 0 would be intuitive for users to know that it would disable cropping entirely on that side. It seems to me like you would want two separate settings - one setting to control which sides the automatic cropping applies to, and then another setting to specify the extra margin to provide for each side. The default margin when using the non-aggressive cropping is 8 density-independent pixels at the moment. I really need to get a feel for how many users would actually benefit from these settings though, as it seems like a fairly uncommon thing to do. Eliminating margins will always ensure that the part of the page you care about is scaled as large as possible, but if you don't match the aspect ratio of the tablet, you'll just get black bars on the sides or top/bottom instead of the white margin. Saving the margins at the top/bottom doesn't make the image any bigger or buy you anything. If your main concern is seeing the entire screen filled, you can just set the page background color to white and it would accomplish the same thing as leaving those white margins if your goal is to fill the screen. You can also just change the page scaling mode to "Full screen" and crop everything the max amount possible, ensuring that you don't have to care about matching the aspect ratio perfectly in exchange for having a slightly amount of distortion of the image as it is stretched out of its normal aspect ratio.

Some other users have asked for options to restrict the cropping region to a specific aspect ratio, meaning you could only resize it diagonally. I may consider doing this if it's useful to people, but I still think it has limited usefulness in general.

In the song editor, go to the files tab, tap the little circle with an i in it to the right of the file name and you will see an option to "Browse Folder". This will open a file explorer window at that location.

Mike

[wthalliii]

See, you had a feature that I needed that I just hadn't found. Now I'll be able to easily find the files from your edit page. Thanks.

I started to add some more detail, but I think that my suggestions might take too many "features" to implement. And you know your users better than I. If my suggestions didn't benefit very many people, I agree that it's not worth it for you to do it.

You mentioned aggressive cropping and full screen mode. I actually tried that, but the aggressive cropping doesn't seem to eliminate much of the margins. I tell you what. Why don't we abandon this discussion, and I'll submit a new thread that explains my experience with the aggressive cropping. I also have another suggestion that I'll submit on another thread.

Sorry to take up so much of your time. I'm sure that you are very busy maintaining MobileSheets. Your response to users is really amazing compared to most companies I deal with, and it is very much appreciated.