[skippertag]

Hi @all,

I'm very new here so if I do something wrong please let me know..

In an other application I use the auto-coloring feature quite a lot... e. g. a Chorus is always background by blue color and the user can pick the color himself. Same for Bridge, etc.. I'm very used to that now and find it very intuitive... that way it's very easy to find the Chorus when it has to be sung again without having to copy it. (I try to get every sheet on one page to avoid scrolling as much as possible)

I know MobileSheets has got a great coloring feature, it's awesome and powerful... only problem I see: when I change something later... e. g. erasing lines, the markings/coloring doesn't move with the lyrics... you see what I mean?

I think it would be great to have such an option in MobileSheets, too, at least for the Chorus.

Mike thinks the best way to achieve that may be by adding a new ChordPro directive.

What do you guys think?

sunny greetings from Germany
Frank

[itsme]

Mike is not in charge for new chordpro directives, look for  user Sciurius in the forum.
Many more features are already available in ChordPro standard V 5.
I'd appreciate that more of these features were supported in MSP.

[sciurius]

Since you have already specified a particular piece of the ChordPro file to be the chorus (using the {start_of_chorus}/{end_of_chorus} directives), the only thing needed would be a MSPro per-song text display setting "Chorus background".
Whether Mike is going to add this is up to him. He has a lot of plans...

[Zubersoft]

Is it better to continue putting additional settings like that in that dialog (that grows ever larger), or would it make sense to support a custom chord pro directive? Granted that means MobileSheetsPro is the only app that understands it, but that would be the case either way. I just wanted to get your thoughts on that.

Thanks,
Mike

[sciurius]

Unfortunately OP didn't mention which tool he uses -- it would be interesting to know whether it works by means of a ChordPro directive or a program setting. Personally I think it is the latter.

In my opinion, ChordPro describes (or should describe) logical structure (songline, chord, verse, chorus, etc.), and should avoid appearance details as much as possible. How the song will look like is dealt with by the viewer programs. This is similar to HTML, where the appearance is defined by external style sheets. Both HTML and ChordPro have legacy issues (e.g. HTML has <B> and <I>; ChordPro has directives like {chordfont} and {textcolor}), but let's not create more of those.

So I am strongly inclined to think this should really belong to the MSPro text display settings.

Having said that, there's always the possibility to use proprietary directives, e.g. {x_mspro_chorus_color}.
https://www.chordpro.org/chordpro/ChordP...extensions

[Zubersoft]

In that case, I'm fine with adding a new text display setting. I like to follow your guidance when it comes to the chord pro specification. At some point I may need to rework that dialog a little so it doesn't continue growing vertically, and instead has tabs or collapsable sections (something like that). 

Thanks,
Mike

[itsme]

My favorite would be having independent font setting for as many chordpro text types as possible.
With "text types" I mean title, subtitle, lyrics, chords, comment, comment_italic and so on.
Each of these could have independent settings for font, size, bold, italic, text color, background color and so on.

It could be implemented with a list of supported types on the text style settings dialog, each with a button that opens a subdialog for specifying the settings. All text types could share the same style settings dialog.
This would be fully compliant with the chordpro standard.

[sciurius]

This would give ultimate flexibility, but this would lead to an awful lot of settings.

Personally, I would be inclined to go for (user definable) styles, and attach a style to each song. I expect users to want most, if not all, of their songs to have the same appearance.

Then it will be a matter of time that users will ask for style settings on individual lines, even words. While lines can already be handled using directives like {textcolor}, arbitrary parts of the text can not. I'm currently working on a design to allow this in ChordPro.

[itsme]

User definable styles are a great idea.
I would use the same appearance for all songs (or maybe a small number of different styles), but would like to adapt lyrics size and chord size per song to make best use of available screen space.

Style settings for parts of a line are one of the things that I miss most in ChordPro.
For me there are mainly two use cases:
1.) We have a lot of songs with a main singer and fill-ins by a background choir.
In this case I have the need to mark the lyrics parts where I have to join in for singing background. (Mark words with highlight, bold, underscore or whatever)
2.) Sometimes it's hard to remember which syllable is the stressed one. Marking on character level with underscore would be my preferred way to do that.

The second feature that I bitterly miss are chord grids.
They are already part of ChordPro V5 but not yet supported by MSP

[Zubersoft]

I'm getting a number of requests for chord grids so I'm going to try to slip that into one of the next updates.

Mike