[Jazaddict]

I see the section of the manual discussing CSV or Bookmark imports.
The CSV is clearly defined.

I dont see the "Bookmark file" defined. 

WHere does it come from?
Are any available for download (as an example file, or if I'm REALLY LUCKY that "fit" my books?)


This is my goal......
I have several large PDF "realbooks".
I want to start typing "All Blues" in some dialog box, and I want to see that it exists in 2 of my books : RealBook1 and JazzFakebook
I want to touch one of them and have the song displayed.

I really don't care about the metadata for composer, Key etc......  I just want the damn song I  select to be displayed....quickly.
It seems like BookMark is the easiest for my needs.
Yes? No?  

How best do I accomplish this?

I'll make my files and share them freely if I could JUST get goin......

[BRX]

PDF bookmarks are part of a PDF, usually created together with the PDF itself. If they exist in your PDF they can be displayed on the left in your PDF reader. If not there's nothing to use to import. You can just hope somebody made a csv file matching your PDF. Some are already available here in the forum.

[Jazaddict]

PDF bookmarks are part of a PDF, usually created together with the PDF itself. If they exist in your PDF they can be displayed on the left in your PDF reader. If not there's nothing to use to import. You can just hope somebody made a csv file matching your PDF. Some are already available here in the forum.

so my choices are 

manually bookmark my own pdfs.

split the pdfs into many individual files and rename them manually 

manually create (or find here if lucky) a csv file that mathes all the tunes in the file.

And the best performance comes from from the "split  into files and rename" effort, huh?

[sciurius]

Manually creating a CSV is probably the best option. It is easy to do, easy to correct, easy to maintain.
There is virtually no performance difference between a pages selection from a big PDF, and a single-song PDF.

[BRX]

Manually bookmarking your pdfs doesn't make much sense here. you're confined to an PDF editor like acrobat and only to title and page. Much easier to use a spreadsheet program like excel for a csv like Johan said.

Also itsme and robipad already posted a huge amount of csvs. There's a good chance there's something you can use.

[Skip]

Another option is snippets. That is a manual operation initially also. You select 'snippets' [tune selections] from the multitune pdf and these are then managed from the main library just like an individual tune pdf. There are some threads here on csv files, one has several files available already. I don't know if it's any easier to do csv file vs bookmarks vs snippets because I don't know how to to do csv's and don't use multitune pdfs.

[BRX]

Easiest for single or only few songs of course are snippets. If you want to batch import lots of titles csv is the best option (also for working from ocred indexes or other sources). Bookmark import really is only for the cases somebody had bookmarked the pdf already.

[Jazaddict]

Egggg...sellent Gentlemen.

THank you for the info.

I was leaning toward CSV as I already have some, and there are some here.
I'm relieved to hear the performance of large file/CSV is competitive.

I'll search here, and......
as I said....I'll bring mine to the party for others (Golden rule and all that....)

Warm regards
Bob

[robipad]

A pdf bookmark file is a simple hidden text file that can be imported and/or exported from an pdf file. The file name should like example: "bookmarks Duke Ellington.txt".
Each line in a text file is a bookmark which points to a page in the pdf file. Each line in the bookmark file may look like this: Caravan/5,Black,notBold,notItalic,open,FitPage
In other words: Song name/page number,bookmark properties and actions.
You easily can create it yourself and import it into any pdf file. The advantage is you can use it in any PDF reader and use it for searching your songs. If the pdf file you downloaded contained already a bookmark file (so a complete bookmarked index) you can import it in your MSP to create a csv file. In any other proper pdf music reader you can import those bookmark files.
For people who want to create a bookmark file themself they can use the jpdfbookmark program to import and export your text file: https://sourceforge.net/projects/jpdfbookmarks/
It is completely free. The bookmark file is a hidden file in your pdf file.

Remember: if you convert an index (from a picture) from a song book and use the page numbers from the index you need to start counting with the cover page beïng number 1. So the page numbers used in the book may differ from the numbers you should use in your bookmark file.

[itsme]

"snippets" as mentioned by Skip lead to the same result as importing via PDF bookmarks or CSV: a song entry in the MSP library that refers to a small part of a large PDF file. The large PDF needs to exist only once for any number of songs referring to it.
CSV is the most powerful method to be used with MSP as it allows importing any meta data that are handled by MSP, whereas PDF bookmarks import only title and page.
The number that you find in a book's table of contents is often not what you need to build a CSV for import. The page number for the CSV is what a PDF reader displays. Very often the difference is just a fixed offset, but you might find books that just number the songs (instead of pages), that skip some page numbers or the like.
If you're going to invest time and effort into creating, checking or improving CSV files you're welcome to share your results.

[robipad]

One advantage of always adding additionally a bookmark file as well is, that you can use it in any proper pdf reader for searching. Additionally you can import the song indexes in any proper music reader. Most work is creating the list of song names and page numbers for an excisting book with say 100-1000 songs. Once you've done that creating a bookmark file and adding it to the pdf book is a matter of minutes. Then you have a pdf book everybody can use in any reader.

It should be remembered that also adding some correct properties in a pdf will be useful. Several  readers will also use the properties which for instance contain the album name, keywords and a composer name (only useful if all songs in the book belong to the same  composers/creators) etc.
Properties are also hidden info in a pdf file which can be read and edited using several free downloadable exe files.

[BRX]

Thanks robipad for reminding me of jjpdfbookmarks. I remember having found and used it a few years before but forgot about it. It's much easier to use that than the PDF editors itself.

Also, if you already have a CSV it's very easy to create a textfile for bookmark import. Before I got my Android tablet and discovered MSP I was considering to improve some of my fakebooks that way. But there's sooo much to do and so few time to get my sheets into MSP in the shape I want.

[Marshland]

There are Fakebook "Index" PDFs available for most of the commonly found Fake Book PDFs. Whether this method would work in Mobilesheets I'm not sure, I can't remember if the feature was added to link from one PDF bookmark to a specific page in a separate PDF file. If it now does, this would do exactly what you're asking for in your original post.

[itsme]

Could you please post a hint to those "index PDFs"? Even if some conversion is required, that would probably be far less effort than typing everything manually or proof-read OCR'ed TOCs

[Marshland]

Here's the last version I have:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/4je6aq..._v1.15.pdf

I'm not sure if it's still being maintained anywhere, it was originally available on a private tracker.
Note that the Fake Book PDF files all need to be in the same folder. For links to work correctly, the PDF books need to be correctly paginated (many were repaginated for this purpose).