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Snippet from multi-PDF song
#1
Hi Mike,

There is some page numbering weirdness when snipping things out of a song consisting of more than one PDF.

i have a songbook consisting of 7 PDFs, each containing a chapter of the book. All 7 PDFs are imported into a single song in MSP (1184 pages). When i navigate to e.g. page 596 to create a snippet out of pages 596-597, the "create snippet" dialog fills the page field with "596". When i try to change the number to "596-597", the "Enter the page order" dialog lists "total pages in file 302" - that is the number of pages in the PDF containing the right chapter... And i cannot enter the absolute page number. But at this point i do not know the correct page number relative to the beginning of the chapter... 
In my case this needs to be adjusted to something like 596-(number of pages in PDFs before the current one).

If i just press OK (without trying to change the page numbers), the created snippet never renders (spins until manual abort) and has the "too large for this PDF" page number translated into a Page order: "0".

Files: (the correct file in the middle...)
Page order is "0", pages in file:1

The obvious workaround is to catenate the PDFs outside of MSP and have only one file per song.  Tongue

Best regards,
  Christof
SAMSUNG Galaxy Tab7+ - Galaxy Tab 6 lite 2024 - MS Surface pro 2017
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#2
That's happening because you'e referencing the page numbers in the book, not the page numbers in the pdf file that makes up the pdf. If the book pages are 596-597, the pdf  file pages may be 234-235. The snippet tool uses the pdf pages not the ones in the book. I don't think the book pages can be read by any pdf reader app. 
If I remember right, when you find the song in the pdf, and initiate the snippet tool, it shows the page being displayed.
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Samsung Note Pro SM-P900 12.2 Android 5.0.2
Samsung S7+, Android 12
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#3
(04-07-2018, 06:52 AM)Skip Wrote: That's happening because you'e referencing the page numbers in the book, not the page numbers in the pdf file that makes up the pdf. If the book pages are 596-597, the pdf  file pages may be 234-235.
Yes, i understand that - it is just that MSP displays the "correct/relative to the start of the book/absolute" page number while browsing through the songbook, and expects the "relative to the start of the chapter PDF" page number when creating the snippet. This relative number of the current page is not shown anywhere (and MSP pre-populates the "wrong" absolute number in the dialog).

It would be nice if MSP would either visibly adjust the page number (596) to match the position in the current file (234), or hide the fact that this is a multi-file-song altogether from the user (and recalculates the appropriate offset from the given absolute number).

As it is now, i don't know how to find out which relative page and in which relative file the currently displayed page is.
SAMSUNG Galaxy Tab7+ - Galaxy Tab 6 lite 2024 - MS Surface pro 2017
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#4
I'm back with you now. I have I have a couple of pdf's containing about 500 songs each that I used learning how to make csv files. Doing this separated each song out and integrated each song into the master library. It took awhile but I have not had to go back and find any specific song since. There are a couple of threads in this forum that may interest you on this project. I haven't done any for a long time so probably can't be of much help. There are a couple of folks that really know their stuff here that may help though.  I think you may need to merge all 7 pdf files to make things work right though. The csv file then goes into the same folder as the large pdf.
Dell Latitude 13.5" 2-in-1 Ubuntu/Win 11
Samsung Note Pro SM-P900 12.2 Android 5.0.2
Samsung S7+, Android 12
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#5
Skip mentioned the magic word: "CSV"
Create CSV files for your PDFs and use CSV import instead of the snippet function.
Merging the PDFs into one and creating one big CSV could be done but is not required.
Keeping separate PDFs and creating one separate CSV for each PDF will also work well.
You can look at examples at 
https://zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/forum...p?tid=3276
first language: German
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www.moonlightcrisis.de - www.basdjo.de - www.frankenbaend.de


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#6
Thanks - I do use CSV already, and i know a workaround for the issue (like catenating the PDFs outside of MSP).
So it is not anywhere critical for me...  Smile

I posted the report because a) snippets do  not work in a meaningful way when the song consists of more then one PDF. And b) the created snippets may cause MSP to not render the snippets but spin indefinitely... Which is a bad user experience while experience a "out of bounds" (page 0) condition.

Avoiding "a" is easy, but then why support multiple files for a song in the first place?
And "b" should not happen, even if this is a corner case.

The reason i even tried to use a) is the following use case: i got this 7 chapter songbook a while ago, stored it "for reference" as-is in MSP. There was no need to properly index it or split it in 800 single songs yet. Until yesterday, when i needed 2 songs on short notice, on the road, with only my tablet and MSP available. "No biggie, you have the book, just create 2 snippets on the fly, include it in the setlist and off you go...".  I ended up with the tablet AND a borrowed printed copy of the songbook instead.  Undecided

Yes, i could have extracted the snippets from the individual chapter-PDF, if i had time to properly think about it and found them in a hurry. But i was confused by the way MSP behaved in this circumstance and time was running short.

And i still think extracting the snippets simply should have worked - regardless if it is one or seven PDFs.  Smile
SAMSUNG Galaxy Tab7+ - Galaxy Tab 6 lite 2024 - MS Surface pro 2017
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#7
It's certainly a bug and I'll look into addressing it.  The easy answer is just to fix what page is entered into the dialog so that it's relative to the current file. I like this approach better than allowing the user to enter a page relative to the total number of pages in the song among all files because the user could enter a value outside the range of pages for the current file, and it would involve additional error checking and handling.

Thanks,
Mike
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