Ipad OnSong help

How do you download a Word Document to OnSong and be able to maintain it via the IPad.???
Tried converting to PDF and text file but Document gets all skewed.
Tried editing via Onsong but converted Document too screwed up to help.

Best I got , so far, is to convert to PDF and take it as is. If it needs modifying, must go back to original Word Doc and modify then reconvert to PDF and replace first copy.

Is that as good as it gets??? Thought about editing new docs on Onsong but keypad leaves a lot to be desired.

Any suggestions???

Make sure the chords are formatted in the right place (i.e.

)

and save as a .txt file.

That's the best format, I've found.

I also do most of my OnSong stuff on the comp in Notepad or whatever the Mac version is called...

Uncleelvis

thanks for your reply. Helps tremendously. I will use your method for future songs.
As for my existing documents, i guess i'll have to use the pdf format and live with it.

Thanks again

Huckleberry said:

Uncleelvis

thanks for your reply. Helps tremendously. I will use your method for future songs.
As for my existing documents, i guess i'll have to use the pdf format and live with it.

Thanks again

Click to expand...

If you have them on the comp (If you've got Dropbox, which I can't recommend highly enough!, you can export to the Dropbox from OnSong on the iPad), you can always open them in the Text Editor, make whatever adjustments, then reimport to OnSong... or copy from the .pdf to a blank .txt file, then make adjustments.

It helps to not use Microsoft Word or any kind of word processor, as dealing with file formats and text formatting leads to all sorts of problems. Try using just Notepad!

Will try that.

THX

Yes, you should use a simple text program like TextEdit, and copy and paste your text into those files. Sometimes that is the only way you can get punctuation to come out right. We had a problem using Pages, and when we pasted into TextEdit, we had to re-type the apostrophes to get them to view properly in OnSong. If you keep it a txt file instead of a pdf, you can use the OnSong features like transposing, font style and size changes, and colors for chords.
–Lori

Thank you Lori. In fact, thanks to all for your input.
The big problem is that I have a lot of songs in Word. Need to convert to text. Tried doing this in Microsoft
but parts of document come out skewed so that it's probably easier to rewrite manually in .txt, with added advantage that it may be
modified with Onsong editor.


Tony

Huckleberry said:

Thank you Lori. In fact, thanks to all for your input.
The big problem is that I have a lot of songs in Word. Need to convert to text. Tried doing this in Microsoft
but parts of document come out skewed so that it's probably easier to rewrite manually in .txt, with added advantage that it may be
modified with Onsong editor.


Tony

Click to expand...

If your songs in Word have the chords above the text you will almost certainly have to retype them for two reasons. First, OnSong needs the chords in chordpro format, which puts the chords inline with the text inside square braces (even though by default they display above the text in OnSong). So, instead of something like
Your file needs to look like this:

[A]Give me a [A7]home, where the [D]buffalo [Dm]roam.

That latter format is a great idea and I've used it for years, long before I ever heard of chordpro or had an iPad and OnSong. The reason being is that the chords and words can't become skewed by the second problem converting from word to text:

In Word, the document is probably using a "kerned" font where the width of each letter is different. I.e. an "l" is narrower than an "M" and so on. Simple text files use the default system fixed font which allocates the same amount of space for every letter. So, when you try to copy a Word document that looks like the first example above you usually end up with skewed chords and something that looks like this in a simple text editor:

Now you can see why I prefered the format with the chords embedded inline with the lyrics long before I heard of chordpro! (I.e. I'm really lucky, almost all of my music is already in a format ready to drop right into OnSong!

The other thing I like about OnSong is you can choose to show the chords inline. The way I format my music for OnSong is I do something like this

[(A)]Give me a [(A7)]home, where the [(D)]buffalo [(Dm)]roam.

Then when I display the chords inline (to save "real estate" on the ipad screen) the chords have the parenthesis around them in the color and font chosen for chords which really helps them to stand out from the lyrics.

(A)Give me a (A7)home, where the (D)buffalo (Dm)roam.

John