Posts: 103
Threads: 24
Joined: Aug 2018
Reputation:
1
I recently added a few Fake Books (PDF's) to my library as multi page documents to have for a back-up for songs I don’t have entered as individual sheets.
What I immediately noticed is when attempting to find a song from the Fake Book index by the referenced page number, I end up somewhere else because MobleSheets counts the first page in the PDF as number 1 while the Fake Book considers page 1 the first page of music, disregarding covers, indexes and other pages.
For example, when viewed in Acrobat an example PDF Fake Book I have refers to the cover page as C1 while the six pages of indexes are referred to as i – vi, however when brought into MobileSheets, C1 becomes page 1 while indexes i - vi become pages 2 – 7.
That means if I try to enter the page number for a song that according to the index is supposed to be on page 7, I actually have to enter page number 14 in MobileSheets. While that may seem like a minor hassle, I have 12 different Fake Books in my library, all with a different number of index and other pages before what the Fake Book considers as page 1 for index look-up purposes. Doing the math in addition to the look-up of the song in the index wastes even more time.
Splitting up the multipage documents into individual pages is of course an option, but I really don’t want to clutter up my library with a bunch of sheets I may already have or never use.
What would be nice is if MobileSheets imported the PDF with the same page numbers as Acrobat, meaning having something other than numbers, (like C1 for covers and i - x for index pages).
Another suggestion would be to add a method to renumber/rename individual pages for an individual multi-page item in your MobileSheets library to accomplish the same thing if it can’t be done easily during the import of the PDF. Or, possibly some way to change the range of page number while still having pages you don’t want in the page count to appear during page turns.
Presently, if you change the range of page numbers from 1 -100 to 6 – 100, you no longer see pages 1 -5 which defeats the purpose of having an index if you can't view it.
Hopefully you understand what I am talking about and thanks in advance for any consideration you give to this suggestion.
Posts: 1,047
Threads: 112
Joined: Dec 2015
Reputation:
11
10-22-2019, 12:06 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-22-2019, 12:06 AM by BRX.)
I like it.
Mike, how about a negative number for exclusion of some pages, like (oh drat, can't use the '-', let's take the '!') !5-100 if the first 6 (counting the '0' as well, I guess) should be excluded from the MSP numbering?
Posts: 277
Threads: 45
Joined: Oct 2014
Reputation:
0
Or what about a way of using, say, a CSV file to generate an index rather than individual songs. Then you could use this to jump to the song in the multi-page PDF.
Maybe these indexes could live in a new tab a bit like set lists, which might make handling them easier and they wouldn't "pollute" the song list.
Andy
Posts: 13,363
Threads: 301
Joined: Apr 2012
Reputation:
235
I can look into supporting other page numbering displays. I researched this and it involves having to look up fields in the PDF that indicates how certain pages are numbered. Apparently these types are supported:
(Optional) The numbering style to be used for the numeric portion of each page label:
D Decimal arabic numerals
R Uppercase roman numerals
r Lowercase roman numerals
A Uppercase letters (A to Z for the first 26 pages, AA to ZZ for the next 26, and so on)
a Lowercase letters (a to z for the first 26 pages, aa to zz for the next 26, and so on)
A prefix can also be specified (which is how the cover pages start with "C") as well as the starting page for a given range (so you could start on page 3 instead of page 1 if there was a reason to). So this definitely adds a lot of complexity in displaying the page numbers, which is something that is very simple in nature right now. I'll have a lot of code changes to make so that values entered by the user can support these page ranges and be mapped correctly back to the actual PDF page numbers. For example, if the document starts with C1 through C5 and i-v for indices, the user should be able to have a page range such as "C1-C3,i-iv,1-15". This is much more complex than what I'm doing now, as I'll have to ignore custom prefixes before numbers and convert roman numerals to digits (no idea if that's internally supported in Java and C# but I'll find out).
So I definitely want to help support this to make your life easier with these PDFs. I don't know if I can justify working on this before the annotations rework or iOS version though as far more people will benefit from the availability of those over better page numbering for large PDFs. If you can wait fora while, then I should be able to get to it after the iOS version is released. If you need something sooner, we will have to brainstorm something that fits within the current design that doesn't require a lot of design and UI changes to support. Nothing comes to mind though that doesn't require a lot of complexity in the implementation. BRX's idea is interesting but I don't really understand how the user would reference the "ignored" pages though for things like bookmarks, link points, etc, or how those pages would be displayed to the user.
Mike
Posts: 103
Threads: 24
Joined: Aug 2018
Reputation:
1
Mike:
As much as I hate to admit it, I can wait...
Right now my workaround is to add to the title of the multi-page document the "fudge factor" (+2, +7, etc) needed to get to the page indicated in the index. Hardly a slick solution and a challenge to do the math after a long night,  but it works for now.
It seems to my limited brain that supporting other page numbering displays in PDF may make the most sense as a first step if all the MS user would have to do is import the PDF. I also assume that if finding a page number when the first pages in a PDF have a different system works in Acrobat or Acrobat Reader, it can work elsewhere...
...maybe?
Regardless, thanks for the interest in the problem and of course thanks for MobileSheets.
We all anxiously await your full-time efforts!
Posts: 1,877
Threads: 290
Joined: Sep 2014
Reputation:
32
Preparing (or finding) a CSV file for each of your fakebooks is imho the way to go.
It's not necessary to import the whole fakebook. On the CSV import dialog you can easily select by song title.
Posts: 277
Threads: 45
Joined: Oct 2014
Reputation:
0
(10-22-2019, 07:01 AM)itsme Wrote: Preparing (or finding) a CSV file for each of your fakebooks is imho the way to go.
It's not necessary to import the whole fakebook. On the CSV import dialog you can easily select by song title.
I tend to agree, but. Like Scherzo I have a number of fakebooks that I use as a "backup" and I would prefer that their songs didn't appear in my main list. I know I can filter things with the various fields, but I think it would be nice to have what I originally suggested. A single entry for the fakebook that opens an index like a set list. This would list all the songs in the fakebook and let you select/open them like any other song.
I would be happy to have a new tab for these "index" entries if that makes it easier and there is no rush (I have several friends wedded to iOS who would love to have MSP  )
Andy
Posts: 103
Threads: 24
Joined: Aug 2018
Reputation:
1
Even though I am totally ignorant on CSV files and how to create them from PDF's, in this case the PDF's are scanned documents meaning no OCR and represent over 4700 individual scanned pages.
Even the master index I have for all 12 books is 69 pages long with over 3700 entries. On that I could tweak the page numbers to match how the song numbers appear when I enter them in MobileSheets, but exporting that PDF to anything else creates a jumbled list that would take days to weeks of full time work to sort out and clean-up just so I could create formulas to tweak the page numbers. Besides, I still would want the individual indexes to be accurate as well so we would be talking about 7400 entries to correct.
Having the 12 books AS books in my library with the ability to be able to look up and use the page numbers in ether the master index or the individual indexes to find the song is what I was hoping to accomplish without spending a massive amount of time to tweak data for something I only want as a back-up when I don't have a particular song in my library as an individual sheet. That's how most people I play with use Fake Books.
If I am missing something that makes creating and using CSV files a snap from scanned documents, enlighten me but in my mind, having MobileSheets use the same page format as Acrobat so things match up when the imported PDF uses other page numbering displays is the way to go for a lot of reasons.
Thanks for the input!
Posts: 1,877
Threads: 290
Joined: Sep 2014
Reputation:
32
"... I am totally ignorant on CSV files and how to create them from PDF's ..."
I recommend changing that. Using CSV files is less difficult as you might think.
"...Even the master index I have for all 12 books is 69 pages long with over 3700 entries..."
This statement makes me assume that you already have a digital table of content of all the songs in your books.
Creating CSV files from that list sounds doable. How does this master index look like? Is it an Excel / LibreOffice Calc file?
Opening a PDF book as a whole and turning pages up to the song you are looking for is not what MSP is designed for. You can do that but there are more convenient ways to handle fakebooks in MSP.
Posts: 1,341
Threads: 99
Joined: Jul 2013
Reputation:
6
I don't use MSP in this way - I much prefer to have individual charts.
However, reading through the messages above, it seems to me that a possible solution is to crop the pages at the beginning of the Fakebook PDF up to the first chart. That would mean the MSP page count would be the same as the modified Fakebook.
Or have I missed something?
Posts: 1,047
Threads: 112
Joined: Dec 2015
Reputation:
11
Essentially you are correct, but that's not cropping (that's "blending out" parts of a page visually, eg. borders with the cropping function) but simply just putting the pages you want into the file tab for displaying the wanted pages.
Posts: 1,341
Threads: 99
Joined: Jul 2013
Reputation:
6
(10-24-2019, 03:05 AM)BRX Wrote: Essentially you are correct, but that's not cropping (that's "blending out" parts of a page visually, eg. borders with the cropping function) but simply just putting the pages you want into the file tab for displaying the wanted pages. Perhaps I should have said 'delete', rather than 'crop'. This would need to be done using a PDF editing program (plenty of those around).
Posts: 277
Threads: 45
Joined: Oct 2014
Reputation:
0
The original problem was that you need the first few pages of the PDF that contain the index. They refer to a page number in the rest of the PDF. Often these page numbers do not start with 1 at the beginning of the PDF (e.g. the index uses pages i, ii, etc.) So when the index says the song you want is on page 123, as far as MSP is concerned it might actually be on 126. So having a configurable offset would allow you to enter the number shown in the index and jump to the right page.
I thought it would be nice if MSP could generate the equivalent of the index page without filling the song list with all the songs. Then you could tap a song in this new index and it would automatically jump to the right place.
Currently you can achieve something similar to this by using a CSV file to create all the songs and put them in the same category. Then use the categories tab to filter your songs, but the unfiltered list would still contain everything.
Hope that makes things a little clearer.
Andy
Posts: 103
Threads: 24
Joined: Aug 2018
Reputation:
1
(10-23-2019, 05:55 PM)itsme Wrote: "... I am totally ignorant on CSV files and how to create them from PDF's ..."
I recommend changing that. Using CSV files is less difficult as you might think.
"...Even the master index I have for all 12 books is 69 pages long with over 3700 entries..."
This statement makes me assume that you already have a digital table of content of all the songs in your books.
Creating CSV files from that list sounds doable. How does this master index look like? Is it an Excel / LibreOffice Calc file?
Opening a PDF book as a whole and turning pages up to the song you are looking for is not what MSP is designed for. You can do that but there are more convenient ways to handle fakebooks in MSP.
As I mentioned earlier, the master index like all of the files is a scanned image file in PDF format. What it was originally created in is beyond me but I have feeling it was in Word. I have no access to the original file, just the scanned 69 page PDF.
My thought was to export it into Excel, create 12 formulas for the 12 referenced books to change the page numbers and go from there. However, the file doesn't export well to other file formats like Excel. Can the exported file Excel be fixed, yes. Do I wish to take the time to fix it, probably not because again, this if NOT my primary source of sheets, just a fallback if I don't have a song among the other 800 individual sheets I have in my library.
I understand fully that MSP isn't designed for this type of application and it would be incredibly easy for me to extract each page as an individual song but infesting my existing 800 song library with another 4000 sheets for convenience sake is definitely not going to happen, not to mention doing the work on the individual imported sheets to re-title & differentiate them from each other in the style I have that information formatted presently.
Maybe I am a bit fastidious (to use a nice word), but my library is VERY organized and I can tell at a glance by scrolling the song list what song & what version is listed which saves me a lot of time looking for something I don't already have in a Setlist or Collection. Bringing in an extra 4000 songs and having anything less than that level of "tidiness" in titles when looking for a song would waste more time than cross-referencing two documents and doing a little addition.
As far as available Acrobat options like deleting the index sheets & covers, I really don't want to do that because there is good information in those pages beside the individual indexes that is nice to have access to. I have given some thought to reordering the pages and putting the front cover & index pages at the back so the first "song" is page one but there would be some awkwardness to that if I want to see those index pages for some reason although, it would be a workaround without losing anything.
Another idea was to remove the page number completely in Acrobat (which can be done) so page one on the original PDF fake book is the first song. I tried that, however when you import a multi-sheet PDF into MSP presently, the first page is page 1 regardless of how or if that first page is numbered in the PDF.
Yes it would be nice if MSP would allow some slick way to get from the index page of one document to another or something similar but I don't know if that is even possible or necessary given the limited applications. I am also leery of the amount of work involved for me to create a workaround within the current feature set to have something similar.
For now I would be delighted for a simple page renumbering capability. I can manage with things as they are now as well, even though I don't particularly like it because I know it I won't need to access those Fake Books very often.
Thanks all for the help and suggestions!
In the meantime, I need to learn more about CSV files and how they can make my life easier with MobileSheets. Any suggestions for that would be appreciated.
Posts: 277
Threads: 45
Joined: Oct 2014
Reputation:
0
A search of the forums for "CSV file" will give you lots of stuff. CSV stands for comma separated variables, but as with lots of these things, they don't always use a comma and MSP is no different. Have a look at this thread and the ones it references for some good information...
https://zubersoft.com/mobilesheets/forum...p?tid=4542
The principle is really quite simple once you have got your head around it. The first line says what is in the file and the order it appears, then each row defines a song. The minimum has to specify a title and the pages within the PDF to use. You can also add more meta-data to specify things like the category and key. Doing this means you can filter on category so you can find all the songs referred to by a CSV file.
There are lots of CSV files for the well known fake books, but if yours isn't one of those you will have to do some typing. People often use a spreadsheet like Excel to enter the data as they have ways to export CSV files and are usually easier than a plain text editor. I suspect it will be too much work for you to enter the 4000 songs in this PDF, but you might want to play with something smaller.
HTH
Andy
|
