[MB10]

Here are some observations I have made in the previous days on MobileSheets for iPad. Some of them might be the same on other platforms. Some seem to be bugs or issues, some are more of a feedback:

1) When creating a bookmark it would be nice if the input field for "Name:" would be automatically selected and the keyboard would be opened as it is necessary to input a name anyway. Also it would be practical if the dialog could be closed with the enter-key confirming "OK".

2) The screen shift to the bottom that is caused by the "Move page below toolbar when annotating" option in the settings of the edit mode does not work when changing the orientation of the tablet in view mode. It gets corrected by changing into edit mode and back.

3) The explanations in the settings of the edit mode (that are displayed by touching the ?-symbols) are too long for the screen and should have an automatic line-break somewhere, otherwise they cannot be read. This issue does not come up on my laptop on MobileSheets for Windows.

4) I used the "Snipping Tool" for the first time. Looks like a very useful and powerful tool! I'm not entirely sure I understand how it works: It copies the selected area and covers it with a white rectangle and with pasting inserts the copied section as an image? And with exiting edit mode it makes the pasting permanent with saving it to the pdf?
This does not seem to be the most obvious and logical way to work for me because it cannot 100% be reversed. I would suggest the pasted image to stay in the layers list as a stamp, in this way you could come back to the cut-and-pasted section, erase it and repeat the process if you are not happy with the result even after exiting edit mode.

5) After doing a number of edits on a page (20+, including dotted and normal lines) trying to change the layer in the layers dialog caused the app to crash.

6) In the layers dialog I would suggest two changes: It would be nice if the annotations could be sorted by layer name as well as by page, because then I could create a layer like "questions" on certain pages and search for them quickly (something similar was suggested by an audio engineer earlier somewhere in the forum). Also it would be very nice if the view would directly jump to a selected annotation when touching it.

[Geoff Bacon]

I have an android tablet so can't answer most of your points.

Re the snipping tool, it sounds as though you have not enabled the "Allow editing of embedded PDF annotations"; this is described in the manual in the "Snipping Tool" section (p131 in current manual).
To change this option, tap 3 vertical dots at top right when editing a file and select "Settings" (it is not in the normal Settings dialogs)

Mike doesn't recommend that users embed changes into the pdf because they make loading (editing?) slower

Geoff
PS:  I've never used this feature so don't have any experience of it!

[MB10]

Thanks Geoff, You are right, it is possible to edit the changes by checking "Allow editing of embedded PDF annotations". This is a good possibility to correct untidy cuttings. It might be a bit complicated in comparison to what I suggested, but probably Mike had some reason why one of the two changes is embedded and the other one is not

[Zubersoft]

1) I'll take a look at that. Those sound like easy enough modifications.

2) I'll take a look at this as well. Just to verify - I enable that setting, then rotate the tablet and things don't appear correctly? What display modes do you have selected for portrait and landscape? A separate issue that I plan to address is that when using that setting, you can't reach the bottom of the pages when using the half page and two page display modes.

3) Should be easy to fix - thanks

4) The snipping tool grabs a section of the rendered image on the screen and then pastes that in the selected location. Until you save the changes, the image is just stored in memory and not saved in the PDF itself. However, the image must be saved in the PDF because trying to embed images in the database would be an awful idea, whereas PDFs are already designed to support bitmap annotations. The white box is just another annotation to cover up part of the page. The image of the PDF page itself (called the content stream in the PDF spec) can't be modified easily, and there are no ways to reverse changes if it is modified. As Geoff explained, if you enable the "Allow editing of embedded PDF annotations", then you can move or delete the bitmap annotations as needed. The reason I don't generally recommend leaving that setting on is because the PDF has to be reloaded in an editable mode every time you enter the annotation editor, and then reloaded normally when you exit the annotation editor. I won't go into the technical details, but I can't just load the PDF in an editable state all the time, so I had to implement it this way as a workaround. If the PDF loads slowly, you'll see a delay when entering/exiting the annotation editor before the pages are displayed. If you can live with that, you can leave the setting on all the time.

5) If you haven't done so yet, please go to the iPad settings, Privacy & Security, Analytics & Improvements, turn Share iPad Analytics on and enable the "Share With App Developers" option. If you do this and a crash occurs, I'll get information about the crash and may be able to address it. This is especially helpful for issues that are very hard to reproduce. I'll look into the layers issue, but if I can't reproduce it easily, I won't be able to implement a fix because I won't know what to fix.

6) I can certainly consider those recommendations in the future. It would probably be added as option where you can control whether layers are sorted first by name, then by page, or by page then by name. What I don't like about this is the ordering will become inconsistent which can matter for the Z-order. It would make it impossible to know the ordering of the layers as they would be sorted alphabetically, and it would also cause a significant amount of chaos in the code as the way I would have to index entries in the list would be completely different, so it would break pretty much all the code. So this won't be a trivial thing to implement. With the selection request, I can support that, but it will get a little odd at times because you can select annotations on multiple pages when using certain display modes, and it would force page changes then in order for the annotations to be made visible, which could get really messy.

Mike

[MB10]

Hello Mike,

2) seems to happen in every combination of display modes in landscape and portrait

4) I understand the different limitations and specifics you are explaining. It might be more logical/consistent to also save the white box into the pdf so that the modification through the snipping tool is then "permanent" for anyone who does not enable "Allow editing of embedded PDF annotations". Having said that, now I know how the editing works it is absolutely no problem for me to check and uncheck "Allow editing of embedded PDF annotations" for the case of cleaning up a somewhat failed snipping tool use.

5) I'm sorry, the option "Share With App Developers" is not available on my iPad as it is a work-device which is controlled by my employer in certain settings. But the crash was easy to reproduce just now through the following steps:
a) make 10 annotations in layer 1 (e.g. 10 differently coloured freeforms)
b) create layer 2
c) make 10 annotations in layer 2 (e.g. 10 differently coloured freeforms)
d) change between layers 2 or 3 times and erase some parts of the annotations of the active layer before changing back (e.g. the middle of a line)

6) I would certainly not want to destroy your ordering logic! But I think this could be a very powerful way to achieve the goal of being able to make some small annotations to a piece while listening in real time and being able to go back through the piece after rehearsal without having to write down somewhere else which pages you made a note on. Perhaps "first page then name" can just stay the underlying logic MobileSheets uses to order annotations but it would just be possible in the layer window to either order by name of layer temporarily or to filter for only annotations that appear in a layer with a certain name, e.g. "remarks 26.4.2023".
For the selection thing perhaps it would be easier if this only applies to situations where you select one annotation and have single page display mode active? The reason it would be a great improvement is that while you are in edit mode there is no way of finding out which page number you are on but the only way to differentiate between annotations is that they are listed per page. So this gets pretty hard to find an orientation which annotation in the list refers to which annotation on which page or to find annotations where you forgot which page they were on.

7) Another issue I just realized is that although I chose "Recent" in the settings -> Library Settings -> Load Options -> Initial Library Tab Mobilesheets always opens up with "Songs" as Initial Library Tab.

As always Thanks a Lot!!!

[MB10]

Hello Mike,

Thank You a lot for your work and all the improvements in version 3.8.0! I just updated and checked the issues that have been improved on and just wanted to give you a little update on two of the issues I raised in this thread that seem to not have been adressed yet:

2) The behavior still exists: When turning the tablet/changing the orientation, the screen is shifted to the bottom, caused through "Move page below toolbar when annotating". The behavior is still the same as earlier: the page shift gets corrected by changing into edit mode and back.

7) This issue also stays the same: Although I chose "Recent" as settings -> Library Settings -> Load Options -> Initial Library Tab, MobileSheets still opens up with "Songs" as Initial Library Tab.

Malte

[Zubersoft]

Thanks for the feedback Malte. I tried multiple times to reproduce issue #2 and could not see it at all. So I'm going to need information about what settings to use in order to reproduce the issue. With the default settings, I did not see the issue at all.

I'll look into issue #7 - I think I overlooked that at the end while going through the remaining issues.

Thanks,
Mike

[Zubersoft]

I also can't reproduce issue #7. If I select recent as the tab, it is selected at startup. What tabs and order have you selected under Settings->Library Settings->Tab Selection and Order?

Thanks,
Mike

[MB10]

Hello Mike,

thanks for verifying on your end! So I made some screenshots that hopefully show the two problems:

The file called 2.1 shows my screen after turning from portrait to landscape (see black at the top).

The file called 2.2 shows how the screen looks normal again after opening and closing edit mode (no black at the top).

The file called 2.3 shows my settings (are these all you need to know? Is there a better way of sharing them with you? Trying around a bit with changing a setting hasn't ended the problem although I didn't try every combination yet).

And the file called 7 shows my Tab Selection and Order (I haven't changed anything from the default settings as far as I know).

I hope this helps! Otherwise please let me know if I can provide additional information.

Thanks, Malte

[Zubersoft]

I see the issue if I rotate the page outside the annotation editor - it's fixed for the next update which I'll release shortly.

I also updated my tab selection and order to match yours, set the initial tab to "Recent", and the recent tab is selected at startup. Can you please try selecting a different initial tab, exit to the library screen, see if it's selected, then select recent as the initial tab again and see if that has any impact on the issue? I'm really not sure why you would be seeing an issue but I am not.

Thanks,
Mike

[MB10]

Hello Mike

yes, issue 2) only occurs outside the annotation editor and is actually fixed by starting annotation editor. Sorry for not having stated that more clearly and thanks for fixing it!

As for the tab selection: I tried changing back and forth between "Recent" and "Songs" as initial tab which didn't change it and then as I chose different initial tabs it suddenly did work. I don't know if there was perhaps something wrong in the background but as it seems to be working now it probably doesn't matter. Just to be as complete as possible: In the selection dialog for the initial tab it is possible to deselect the selection by clicking on the filled circle and then no initial tab is selected.

Thank you for helping with clearing these issues up!

Malte