Fancy Picture Paper

PDFs r totes the OG way to hoard chord charts & lyrics sheets. Yeah, you've prolly been collectin' these bad boys for like, forever to organize your digital music hoard. Adobe PDF is all like "I'll keep your printed page lookin' perfect & work on literally any computer ever," which is chef's kiss. But srsly, let's chat about why PDFs are also kinda a nightmare & how you can squeeze the text outta them without losin' your mind.

Adobe PDF files show up in OnSong like a frozen TV dinner — zero edits, zero format tweaks, & they're basically banned from low light mode. ZOMG right?? Even tho these files claim to have text inside 'em, that text is literally positioned for printin', not for other apps to actually understand it. Plus, PDFs can be straight-up graphics, scanned images, or some franken-combo of both. Oh, & they can be encrypted too — because apparently keepin' you out of your own files is fun. Bottom line: every PDF is its own special snowflake, so there's literally no magic wand that works on all of 'em.

You can rip the text outta a PDF inside OnSong by hoppin' into the Song Editor & tappin' that Extract Text button in the Conversion Toolbar (it pops up before the keyboard shows up, how thoughtful). OnSong will try to yank the text straight from the PDF first, & if that's a bust, it'll go full robot mode with Optical Character Recognition (OCR). You'll prolly end up with some text, but buckle up buttercup — you gotta babysit it & massage it into a format OnSong actually gets. Also, encrypted files? Enjoy your word soup of garbled nonsense. Those are basically locked down tighter than Fort Knox & there's nothin' we can do about it.

Here's what kinda chaos you might run into with extracted PDFs:

Bad Spacing

Sometimes the text comes out like a toddler arranged it — out of order & spaced like they sneezed on the keyboard. PDFs love usin' text shortcuts to align stuff with a million tiny text chunks. OnSong tries its best to figure out where these fragments belong using fancy math, but lol, sometimes it needs you to step in & fix it manually.

Chords with Extra Spaces

Every chord chart is a unique snowflake made by some dude with software & questionable decisions. Maybe the original file had like a million spaces to line up chords above lyrics. If they used a wonky variable-width font, congrats — you're gettin' even MORE spaces than actually needed. Pop over to Fix Alignment Spaces in the Text Tools Menu (found in the Menubar of the Song Editor) to squish those chords back down, then tweak 'em by hand if you're feelin' spicy.

Compressed Chords

Plot twist: chords can also be crammed together like sardines on a line above the lyrics. This happens when someone put chords in text boxes & tried to align 'em (narrator: they did not succeed). You're gonna have to manually line those bad boys up over the right lyrics in the Song Editor. Sorry, that's just how it be.

Garbled Characters

Tryna extract text from an encrypted PDF? Congrats on your screen full of alphabet soup! You'll need to undo the whole thing or bail out of the Song Editor & find literally any other way to get that text. Seriously, encrypted files are the worst.

Unrecognized Characters

If OnSong can't just grab the text straight from the PDF, it might gotta call in the big guns — Optical Character Recognition (OCR), aka "robot tries to read your document like a person." Dependin' on how crusty your PDF is, this might turn your flat symbol into a lowercase "b" or turn faded text into complete gibberish. Go through it & fix stuff by hand in the Song Editor like the meticulous human you are.