01-21-2016, 05:24 AM
(01-21-2016, 04:49 AM)sciurius Wrote:Quote:(01-21-2016, 02:26 AM)sciurius Wrote: First, I'm currently finishing a tool that reads iRealPro data and formats this into a nice PDF.
You mean a PDF containing a table of contents of all the songs? My PDFexploder does that, using LaTeX actually:
I get the feeling that you do not know what iRealPro is.
I'm not sure why you get that feeling; I've been using iRealPro heavily since long before it got renamed from iRealB. Perhaps it was because my last statement was a bit misleading - the PDFexploder doesn't take iRealPro data as input, but it does generate a ToC PDF, which is what I got the impression (maybe incorrectly) that your tool also does, once it's parsed the iRealPro data.
(01-21-2016, 04:49 AM)sciurius Wrote:Quote:This was quite cool, but I realised that a huge PDF is unwieldly, and it's much nicer to have one song per PDF, because this works more smoothly regardless of what music reader you choose to use. Even in MSP it makes it easier to build set lists by cherry-picking songs.
MSPro works with songs, and it does not matter whether a song corresponds to a single-song PDFs or a page selection from a huge PDF.
"It does not matter" is true in the sense that MSPro supports page selections from a huge PDF. But that kind of misses my point about the UX. It's easier to import when there is no page selection to configure. There are other advantages to exploding a big PDF prior to import too, e.g. the potential to save space on your device by only importing the songs you really need, and it makes it easier to open songs using other PDF readers too (which is particularly important to me right now due to http://zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/forum/...p?tid=3224 ...) A third one is that an autogenerated ToC PDF can have hyperlinks to the PDF for each song, and this will work reliably without requiring that your PDF reader supports deeplinking from one PDF to a fixed page inside another PDF.
Having said that, the pros and cons of each approach here are marginal, so I really don't think it's worth debating them in too much depth (and I don't have the time to continue with it anyway). Both approaches are perfectly valid, and both will suit users with differing use cases, so both are worth having as options. Enough said :-)