Is it possible to add a new feature in the display menu that enables us to automatically remove white spaces around music sheets in order to display them as wide as possible?
I am working on cropping right now. I will make sure I add an automatic cropping option. I'm going to post a message tomorrow for user feedback concerning zooming. In my opinion, once I implement cropping, zooming won't be needed as much, so I'm considering not saving zoom values anymore. Hopefully everyone will chip in on how they use the app, and their needs.
In my opinion I would leave the zoom memory as it is right now because it is always useful. Maybe later you can implement the choice for the user to save the zoom or not, but for the moment the priority is the auto crop function which is essential with a10 inch tablet... Music sheets appear so small!
01-15-2013, 07:17 AM (This post was last modified: 01-15-2013, 11:14 AM by Snard.)
Okay, here are my 2 cents on cropping/zooming. I will start with a little background on my usage.
I sing in a choir, and the music I import into MobileSheets is a combination of the following:
1. Scanned by me from paper
2. Created by me from music layout programs (Noteworthy Composer, MuseScore, Lilypad)
3. PDF scores purchased online
4. Scores of type 1 and 2 above, but created by other choir members with tablets
For documents of types 1 and 2, I choose page size and margins that are compatible with my tablet and create PDF scores that I can directly consume. No zooming or cropping is needed.
Some of the other tablet-wielding choir members have iPads, so the scans/documents they make are optimized for the 4:3 aspect ratio, whereas the ones I create are optimized for 16:10.
For documents of types 3 and 4, I often need to crop or zoom, because the document aspect ratio and/or margins don't match my tablet. The current Zoom function works for this sometimes, but not if the scan/document has uneven margins.
By the way, it just occurred to me that for cropping, it would be possible to allow the cropped document to be stretched to fill the screen (i.e. not preserving the original aspect ratio). I don't think I would want this behavior; I prefer my music to "look right" even if there will be extra white space at the top/bottom or left/right. But for people who don't mind, you could have a "Preserve Aspect Ratio" checkbox.
This raises another question, that is relative to a question/issue I posted elsewhere: if I have documents with zoom or crop settings, and I share them with another MobileSheets user via a restored backup, how would those settings be handled by the other tablet, if its screen size/format was different than mine?
I'm going to remove the option to save zoom per page, but I will still support saving zoom values per song. This works well if all of the pages are the same size, or at least close. It's just going to get messy if I try to combine cropping with zooming per page.
Great suggestion with the "Preserve Aspect Ratio" checkbox. I'll definitely make sure to add that. As for your question about sharing songs, the other user would get your saved cropping/zoom settings. If the tablets are similar in size and form, this isn't a big deal, but you could definitely get some undesirable settings otherwise. I could always provide an option to reset cropping & zooming while restoring, or just have an option in the song editor. I don't think this is something I can automatically account for though (or at least not easily). If anyone wants to do the math for me on how I would scale the crop & zoom settings between tablets of two different sizes when the score is going to be scaled differently based on the screen sizes to begin with, please let me know
A lot of my charts are either hand written or very old (seems reasonably common in big band music) and have completely different amounts of white space on each page. Just to clarify, will it be possible to zoom one page of a song and position it independently of another page in the same song?
This isn't actually a problem for me because I have created images for every one of my songs and cropped them right down to the edges manually. However, it would be a huge issue had I not done that if it's not going to be possible to position every page independently.
I realize that the current zoom function is changing once crop is added, but I have a question about how it works now in the song editor, because it seems odd to me now, and it would be great if this "oddness" can go away when the code is changed Basically, when I bump the zoom amount for a particular page of a song, it displays a preview box on my page to attempt to show me how the song will be zoomed when I view it. Unfortunately, that preview is almost always wrong, so I end up having to pick a zoom value, then view the song, then go back and tweak the zoom amount until it displays the way I want (and this usually takes several tries). I think this is happening because the preview window doesn't take into account my tablet's aspect ratio. When I view a song, MobileSheets will do a "best fit" of the song on the tablet so that all of the page is visible. I.e. if the aspect ratio of the song is different than my tablet screen, then white space is added on the left/right or top/bottom as appropriate.
What would be nice to see in the song editor is a preview window that matches my screen's aspect ratio, and that shows how the song page will actually look when I view it (with a box outline that shows the actual song page size). Then when you set crop/zoom for a song, the preview could show the page zoomed in on this screen-shaped box. When you want to set the crop/zoom size, the song could be displayed full screen with a sizing box that you could drag or resize to set the desired amount of crop/zoom. Is this how your were planning to do it? Does this make sense?
If you crop pages the way you want, I'm not sure that it would make sense to change the zoom and position for each page independently. In fact, it seems like it would be more troublesome most of the time if I do that. I'm open to opinion though.
Snard, the current page per zoom setting doesn't work well on some tablets, I admit. What you have suggested is exactly my plan. I will provide a little image preview, but in order to crop the image, you will be taken to a full screen preview where you can drag to crop. I will support zooming on this same screen as well.
This has been a big thing for me since I've recently gone over to digital scores. I've got lots of scanned PDFs, not all of which are in great shape, plus I wanted to crop any whitespace.
I searched around for ages, and though there are a few options, it seems the most promising solution is to use a combination of Imagemagick, a neat little program called Unpaper. The process isn't flawless, in fact it fails more often than not, as I've not spent the time to play with the parameters for unpaper, but when it does work, the improvement is remarkable.
I'll attach my bash script for the process. The workflow for using Unpaper is hinted at on its website. I extract the images from a PDF, unpaper and crop them, then glue them back together under a different filename.
Imagemagick's convert can be used for simple cropping, and includes a -fuzz option to deal with noisy images. I checked the license and it looks like it can be statically linked at no cost.
Re-reading the thread, I realise that the discussion is about a non-destructive crop. This is just a little food for thought then. Forgive me for going slightly off topic.
07-03-2013, 02:04 PM (This post was last modified: 07-03-2013, 02:05 PM by hzeller.)
What is the state of this feature ? I think in particular with the upcoming side-by-side view of multiple pages, every millimeter counts on smaller screens.
As for the interface, I'd provide a 'autocrop' button that just removes the whitespace around pages, but then additional sliders on all four borders to further narrow the view (often, there are page-numbers or other text at the top/bottom of the page that should just be cropped away.
I'm still working on this for the next update. There are just so many changes that it's taking a very long time to implement. I really appreciate everyone's patience.
