04-20-2021, 09:02 AM
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.
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.