Ending Word document support?

[arlo]

Set List Maker currently supports documents in PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Pages, Keynote, RTF, plain text and JPEG format. From what I've seen, PDF and Word are the most commonly used formats. Some other songbook apps only support PDFs.

I always recommend the PDF format because it renders more accurately than Word. PDF is also required for saving document zoom positions, and supports custom background colors. In general, iOS supports PDF better than the other formats. Most recently, iOS 7 introduced problems with Word files that caused crashes for some users and took many hours of troubleshooting to resolve.

So the question is, what would you think if I dropped support for all document formats but PDF (and possibly JPG)?

[Goldtop]

No issue with dropping Word support. Would prefer that you continued to support RTF and plain text files though, in addition to PDF and JPG.

[doglegleftmusic]

I've found that about 95% of my docs are in various Word doc formats.  i think the different versions of Word have caused me some pasting issues into the lyrics section, but I have worked through.  Having to convert everything to pdf would be a lot of work.  It would force me to clean up my files but as I use copy and paste of Word docs into the "lyrics" section of SLM instead of the doc attach view, it would probably be a lot more work.

[arlo]

As I use copy and paste of Word docs into the "lyrics" section of SLM instead of the doc attach view, it would probably be a lot more work.

If you're pasting lyrics into the Lyrics field, rather than attaching Word documents to your songs, then this change wouldn't affect you. (You would still be able to copy and paste from a Word document to the Lyrics field.)

[Jmfocus]

I changed all my documents into PDF before emailing to my ipad and setting up with SLM. Now that I have used the app for a couple weeks I am sei the need to go back and tweak some documents to work better with the auto scroll feature. Since the docs are still on my computer, its not an issue.

One thing I have noticed is that when you enlarge a PDF, it doesn't appear to changed the scrolling time to compensate for the larger text that is scrolling.

[arlo]

One thing I have noticed is that when you enlarge a PDF, it doesn't appear to changed the scrolling time to compensate for the larger text that is scrolling.

I think that would depend on your Settings > Automation > Calculate Auto-Scroll Duration setting. If Automatic, it should adjust; if Manual, you would have to adjust it. Please follow the instructions under Requesting Help on this page if you need more help with that: http://www.arlomedia.com/apps/setlistmaker/support/help.html

[dr_rollo]

I'm mostly starting with Word, but always export it as PDF, what is quite easy since PDF export is embedded (since Office 2007?). I would appreciate to keep the option importing JPG, because I sometimes using GUIDO creator for creating a small Sheet with notes quickly on the iPad, or take a photo to add as document, without the need to convert it to PDF.

[Dsteven73]

Does that mean that Support for pages would end as well?  I have a lot of documents in pages that are in SLM. I would like to see JPG, and PDF supported. I could work around no Pages support...

[Musicalbox23]

I use copy / paste (from websites, Word or Pages docs) on my iPad 2 to create my documents. That said the PDF format is extremely unfriendly to copy / paste, especially if the file has any embedded formatting. Personally I can't stand PDF docs and avoid them whenever possible. 

[jeebustrain]

I don't use Word, but I do use Libreoffice to build my note sheets. I keep all of the files in a specific folder. I have a script that I run whenever I make an edit to auto-generate PDF files for each. Before SLM, I would use a CSV input file to merge the PDFs (via terminal) into a single pdf, allowing me to page through them during the gig. In other words, I have no use for word doc support.

I don't know if MS Word supports it, but it's drop-dead simple to do this method using OpenOffice or LibreOffice.

Just run this in a directory with all of your files:
libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf *.odt

(you can change the .odt to .doc or .docx)

[arlo]

Great tip, thanks!

The new Android version only supports PDF documents, but I haven't had problems with Word support in iOS for a while, so my thoughts about removing that are currently on the back burner. Unfortunately, iOS 8 broke support for RTFs and it's not clear if that is coming back (it's still broken in 8.1).

[surgesound]

Don't do this!