[ghmerrill]

This may have been covered (perhaps indirectly) elsewhere and, if it has, then just redirect me.  But I haven't seen anything explicit about exactly this ...

I just got a digital copy of an exercise book and sucked it into Mobilesheets (on my Windows instance).  It's a PDF.

I thought I'd need to go through and add bookmarks, but when I went to do that I discovered the bookmarks were already there!  Most of the bookmarks are for each individual page, appear to be sequentially accurate, and labelled correctly as to page number.  However, the text used for a bookmark often does not appear in the document itself, and I speculate (?) that MobileSheets may be using some sort of metadata it's finding in the PDF file. 

As an example, the bookmark for page 11 is "Bass Etudes Combined - Page 11" where "Bass Etudes Combined" appears nowhere in the displayed PDF document, but would be an accurate metadata description of the entire section which begins on p. 11.  Interesting. 

Anyhow, what I have by default is a fairly nice and complete list of bookmarks for this PDF, but many of them are uninformative since they display only the page number rather than the title of the page.  E.g., "Page 12" rather than "2. Sentimentality".

So my question is ...  Can I somehow edit this nice list of bookmarks directly and just replace "Page x" with a meaningful title/description?

Or is the best way to edit the PDF file directly prior to importing it?

[itsme]

You need to know that MobileSheets' bookmarks (in the MobileSheets database) and PDFBookmarks (in the PDF) are two different things. The checkbox "Show PDF Bookmarks" in the bookmarks window makes MobileSheets show also PDFBookmarks and lets you use them for navigation.
PDFBookmarks are shown by most PDF readers. To edit them you need a PDF editor that is capable to do that. Acrobat Pro and other professional tools you can buy can do that. The only free tool for Windows that I know of is jPDFBookmarks https://sourceforge.net/projects/jpdfbookmarks/ Rather old, but still works fine.

This thread https://www.zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/f...11892.html in the MobileSheets forum explains the facts and the wording and contains a number of links to tools and to other forum threads. It is a good starting point to learn more.

[ghmerrill]

Thanks.  I've been using PDFelement for some years.  It appears to support editing bookmarks.  That would seem to be the most straightforward approach.

I originally mis-read your "frankenbaend.de" address as "frankenabend". Apparently along the lines of "frankentuba", my brain morphed it into "Frankenstein evening".   It seemed like an interesting concept, but then I noticed the error.  That "ae" combination can be dangerous for an English-speaking reader. 

[itsme]

The German Umlaut in our band name "Frankenbänd" becomes 'ae' for an ASCII URL. Copy/paste would have forwarded you to https://kubiss.de/frankenbaend/

[ghmerrill]

I tend to find missing umlauts disorienting (also unattractive).  I guess it's reasonable to do in the URL context.  I haven't looked to see how that issue works out in non-Latin alphabets.     Now that I think about it, I'm not sure when any translation should be necessary for the URL -- I mean, theoretically.  As a practical matter it might be a bit of a pain and would need to make assumptions about the target display environment.

At this point, I'm most of the way through editing those bookmarks with PDFelement. 

[ghmerrill]

Okay, at this point I have all those PDF bookmarks edited appropriately and working -- at least working in a PDF.  But I'm confused about how they're supposed to work in a piece that I'm displaying and navigating in MobileSheets.

When I display my piece, there's no way (like the typical side panel) to display the bookmarks list without going into overlay mode?  So using bookmarks to navigate through a piece requires toggling back and forth through overlay mode?

Also, if I click on the Bookmarks tab, the list of pieces displayed does not include this one with all the PDF bookmarks in it -- although in overlay mode, they're all there.  Is that expected?

And ... Is there an advantage to converting PDF bookmarks to MobileSheets bookmarks as part of the import? (I guess there might be if using the Bookmarks tab won't display pieces containing only PDF bookmarks?)

[itsme]

A bit of guessing as I don't know your PDF and what you want to achieve:
You could use PDF2CSV from MSPro tools on github: https://github.com/sciurius/MSPro-Tools to convert the PDFBookmarks to a CSV. 
Importing your PDF via Import - CSV File using such a CSV file creates a separate song in MobileSheets for every line in the CSV.
Using CSV files is discussed in many threads in the forum e.g. https://www.zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/f...-8565.html

[ghmerrill]

The whole intermediate CSV file approach is generally unattractive to me -- and also unnecessary, as it turns out.

Basically, the conceptual model (and functionality) of bookmarks in MobileSheets is a bit at odds with my needs for them.  I have several digitized (PDF) exercise/technique books that I use on a regular basis for practice.  It's particularly effective to have what's basically a table of contents that consists of links to each of the "pieces" (or sections, or whatever) in such a book, displayed so that I can move around in the book simply by clicking on the title of the piece (or page) in that table.

Since I've lately been focused on getting all my music into MobileSheets -- to the point that I've been viewing MobileSheets as a "one stop shopping" approach to my sheet music organization -- I've been adding these technique books as well.  But this is silly.

Just as MobileSheets does a bunch of things way better than trying to organize things into PDFs, PDF does some things way better than MobileSheets.  One of these is -- surprise  -- document-oriented bookmarks that can easily be used for navigation in a (PDF) collection of sheet music.  Rather than trying to twist MobileSheets' model and implementation into a form it's not intended for, the obvious answer is to simply not bring these things into MobileSheets at all, and simply keep them in PDF.  There, I can edit the bookmarks however I like, have them displayed in an easily used side panel, and use touch or foot pedal to navigate through the material.  Problem solved. 

[Skip]

I wonder if loading just the book PDF/w bookmarks to MS then using a smart button to bring up the PDF editor would work.