Posts: 2
Threads: 1
Joined: Feb 2023
Reputation:
0
Hi all, brand new here but I've been using MobileSheets Pro for a while now. My situation is: I play a fair amount of theatre, and the book I get is typically a single PDF file containing 30+ songs. Sometimes the order gets changed, or I add a sheet because the key has changed or whatever.
Is there any way to create a setlist that points to specific pages within the PDF file? I know I can use the snippet tool to break out individual songs, but my songlist has over 400 songs already and I'd really prefer to just have the one score file.
Thanks for any ideas!
Bill
Posts: 13,377
Threads: 302
Joined: Apr 2012
Reputation:
236
Unfortunately, no, you can't do that at the moment. You'd have to use something like the bookmarks window to jump to pages in that PDF if you want to have a single song entry. If I change bookmarks to support a range of pages in the future, then they could act like songs and be added to setlists, although I'd still have to do a lot of work to ensure that none of the features are broken by this.
Mike
Posts: 933
Threads: 84
Joined: Feb 2017
Reputation:
28
The normal way is to import the pdf with a matching .csv file that specifies the song name and what page(s) it uses.
The .csv file is just a text file in a specific format showing the field headings and then one line per song.
You need to import the .csv at the same time as the .pdf file; you can't import the .csv file against an already imported pdf.
If your pdf has bookmarks then you my be able to use these to populate a .csv (I've never used this feature).
Also Scirius(?) has some tools that may help.
Suggest you search the forum for .csv and/or read the manual (it is a difficult concept to work out how it works).
Look for examples of the first line and try a small .csv first to see how it works i.e. just try a few titles in your pdf.
When generating the .csv, make sure that you add a field specifying a unique collection that the songs go into; this lets you filter by this collection on the Songs page e.g. to delete them all so that you can refresh your pdf with a newer version.
Finally, if you are likely to replace the big pdf then you can't really use annotations; this is because they won't propagate to a newer pdf (unless the existing page ranges don't change).
If you want to use annotations then I suggest you use a pdf splitter and import the files as separate songs. This means that you can replace individual songs and maintain their annotations (it does assume that you can identify which pages are changed)
Note: I do this for a pdf that someone else modifies/maintains.
It's a long time since I used a .csv so I may have omitted something.
Geoff
Samsung Galaxy Tab A6
Posts: 2
Threads: 1
Joined: Feb 2023
Reputation:
0
Thanks, Mike and Geoff, for the quick replies! Bookmarks may be the way to go here. I hadn't considered the annotation implications of a single big PDF file too. Again, thanks for some good ideas.
Bill