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I have some books as pdf that are over 100 pages (some even 500+), most of which songs consist of only a few pages. I think it works best in MobileSheets to import each song as a separate pdf. But when I split the original pdf, the individual files are almost as large as the original. I have read that this probably has to do with fonts and other overhead returning in each file.
Am I doing the right thing to split these types of files before importing or does this make the MS database unnecessarily large?
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I think it's fine to do what you are doing. Having said that, one thing you can consider is waiting for the next update where I'm adding a completely new page ordering UI. In this UI, you can pick the pages you want, then tap the three dots at the top right and tap "Save as New PDF". MobileSheets will then produce a new PDF from those few pages you selected. Whether or not the PDF that is generated by MobileSheets will be smaller than the PDFs you are currently generating is something that you will have to check.
As far as file sizes go, this has no impact on the MobileSheets database or library. It just consumes more of your disk space, but it doesn't impact MobileSheets in any other way (other than the time it takes to load each individual PDF if you select that song).
Mike
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Space and performance aside, splitting PDFs is entirely unnecessary and a waste of time. Each song file can simply point to appropriate page(s) in the pdf.
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10-18-2023, 09:50 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-18-2023, 09:51 AM by Zubersoft.)
There are pros and cons to each approach. Using a CSV and sharing the same PDF over all the songs has benefits in terms of disk space, but due to some existing shortcomings in the CSV import, this can cause issues for some users, as the original PDF will be duplicated as the directory it is copied to is based on the title of the first selected song in the CSV import dialog. If you import all of the songs you need at once through the CSV import, then you get the maximum benefit, but if you import the same csv multiple times in a row, and select different songs each time, the original PDF is going to be duplicated, taking up additional disk space. I plan to address this by detecting if the original PDF is already in use in the library, and using the existing file in the library if possible instead of copying the file to a new location.
If you instead split off the PDF into many smaller pieces, each piece is truly independent of the others, which can nice in some scenarios (like if you want to embed annotations without impacting other songs in the library that might share the same PDF). It just depends on how the library is setup and what features are needed
Mike
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Thanks for all your replies, it would even be much easier leaving those PDF's as single file.
Doing this, is it still possible to create a playlist pointing to the song files within that large PDF?