Font size?

[chrisjbaik]

@varoot wondering if there's any option to adjust the font size on the outputted PDFs? I'm looking to see if we can migrate over to this for our band songbook, but I think a few things that we would need are:

1. Font size (chords and lyrics both need to be larger to be viewable from a distance and in the dark)
2. Adjusting margin/gutter size? I think we might be able to maximize the page space better and have larger font sizes if we had more horizontal space. Along with that, if we could condense two lines to a single line if there's space to, that might be a good option at certain points.

[varoot]

Are you talking about adjusting font size for all songs or adjusting font size differently for each song (as how you guys are doing right now)? The first one is easy and in fact you can experiment with it yourself in ChordsifyPHP (styles.yaml). The second one might be very tricky, but currently it squeeze the font (condense) if the line exceeds the column width. I've experimented with different effects (i.e. letting the line run out of column width, cutting the remaining words to new line) and this is the most desirable look.

As for margins, everything is adjustable of course, currently it is at 36pt (0.5") for top and bottom. We actually don't have a fixed margin size for left and right and we fix column width. Why? Because we want same horizontal space for both Letter and A4 paper (therefore they'll have different margins). Gutter is always twice the left/right margin size.

In short, all these properties (and also line height) are adjustable through styles.yaml. You just need to find the right value (which we supposed to do during the summer... lol)

As for combining lines when there's enough space, I would actually suggest that we format the lyrics/chords to match how we want it to look, because there will be a lot of cases where we still want them on separate lines and it's hard for computer to make that decision.

I also some good news for you... there is also a way to print out the first letter of the first word and a number like how the band uses... it's not a selectable option right now but it can be done (right now you can only print out numbering like 1, 2, 3... and you can't force it to sort the song sheet in a certain way yet)

[chrisjbaik]

I meant the former - adjusting font size for all songs, but after you mention it, I think the second one would also be a huge benefit as well.

For margins, maybe we can then increase the fixed column width to maximize the space we use for A4 paper (since the width is smaller than letter paper). There is an odd quirk that when you print out a songbook for a 3-ring binder, odd pages need to have a larger left margin and even pages need a larger right margin so that there's space to do the hole punching. I can play with these sometime soon.

For combining lines, I'm wondering whether this becomes a problem when you want to print different versions for chords and lyrics - should we start to separate the formatting for the two? Because for chord sheets you may want to combine two lines, but for lyrics it may look cumbersome.

For printing in a specific order, do you think it's difficult to implement that? I know there's going to be a few quirks because of fitting it in a page, but I think it's okay to flip-flop two numbers as long as it's still on the same page somewhat.. Or maybe the burden for this should be on the user to order the songs so that the printing comes out correctly? We already face this difficulty and have to switch the order of songs frequently when we use the PPT.

[chrisjbaik]

@varoot, I made a few changes to chordsify-php as well as Psalted to do some of the stuff above (mostly separating chords/lyrics in Psalted, and creating a chords style in styles.yaml)

Still need to:

1) Have different margin options for odd pages and even pages 2) (Optimally) force a specific order for songs when generating PDF

[chrisjbaik]

@varoot any thoughts?