Import from ODF format

[Leigh Semmens]

I have over a thousand songs in my song list all were created years ago in MS Word and have since been converted to Open Document Foundation format for use with LibreOffice. I also have pdf versions of these files. Some of which have been imported into songsheetpro on an iPad. Is there ANY way to import either the ODF or PDF file into OpenSong format without a lot of re-writing. Given that I have performed this task several times over the years. It does get tedious. (My computers and music affair started way back in the days of DOS.)

GIven that I am not a huge fan of M$ or Apple products, this looks promising for Android. I run Linux on all my computers.

[Gareth Evans]

Hi Leigh,

Thanks for your email!

Unfortunately Android doesn't bundle with the ability to display MS Word or ODF files by default.  I know you can download software to view them, that conversion isn't available directly to other apps.

As long as your Android device runs Android lollipop or newer, however, then it will display pdf files just fine, although you won't be able to transpose or edit the files.  I've got a newer version of the app in development (V6) which will offer to extract the text from pdf songs using optical character recognition and that version allows you to save extra don't info such as key, search text, etc to allow PDF docs to have more functionality - it's coming soon!  The current V5 of the app will let you use pdf files and add them to sets fine, but is less good at dealing with pads, metronomes, etc for pdf files.

I am aware of an import utility to convert word documents into OpenSongApp format.  I've not used it personally, but it is available from the desktop version of OpenSong's downloads page.  I'm not sure if it reads odf files though:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/opensong/files/

On Mon, 31 Oct 2022, 05:13 Leigh Semmens, <wlse...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have over a thousand songs in my song list all were created years ago in MS Word and have since been converted to Open Document Foundation format for use with LibreOffice. I also have pdf versions of these files. Some of which have been imported into songsheetpro on an iPad. Is there ANY way to import either the ODF or PDF file into OpenSong format without a lot of re-writing. Given that I have performed this task several times over the years. It does get tedious. (My computers and music affair started way back in the days of DOS.)

GIven that I am not a huge fan of M$ or Apple products, this looks promising for Android. I run Linux on all my computers.

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[Leigh Semmens]

Thanks for your response. None of my documents are in the M$ format now. I understand the proprietary issues with that format. ODF, on the other hand is an open format, just like  you OpenSongApp format. It might be worth considering creating a script to import such files too. In the mean time, is there a method that I can use to convert said format manually on a PC running Linux. This would be an absolute pain on a tablet! Thanks again.

[Sarah Dab]

Hi Leigh,

OpenSongApp will display PDF (Android lollipop or newer).  You can use a file manager to copy your PDF files under the 'opensong/'songs' folder.  Start OSA and all songs, including the PDFs, will be indexed and list in the app.

As with any new songs you would then 'Edit' each song to add further detail, key, tempo etc. and make it as you like.  The 'Pad' option allows you set the key and pad options too.

This extra OSA song information, which is not part of the PDF file, is written to a file under 'openSong/Settings' called 'NonOpenSonSongs.db'.  If you want to set up OSA on a new device then copy this file as well as the songs to the new device and then install and open OSA - the new install will then have access to the extra song information.

OSA does not know what text is in a PDF or image file so search can only work on the name of the file,  so name them well.  OSA cannot transpose or change the look and layout of these as-is formats.  These songs open as a page.  Multi page PDF are supported.  If you zoom a page, scroll up and down within the page is supported.

Please do not expect OSA to handle PDFs well - paid for songbook software from major vendors also find PDFs / Word / ODF difficult to support with less features available when using these formats.  OSA is shared for free, makes no commercial use of our information and has only a small team gifting it to us - I am amazed and grateful for how much it does.  I wish you well in your investigation of OSA.

Have fun.

Sarah

[Leigh Semmens]

Thanks  for trying Sarah, I had already determined that the program would display PDFs with no ability to modify them, This is no different to a normal PDF reader. How does OpenSongApp handle standard text files? Can it import those with, obviously, the need to flag chord lines, and instructions or must I re-type each song on the tablet?
 I do have a paid program on an iPad called SongbookPro which does all that I require, however, I'm hoping to get away from the apple product as it is not my preferred platform. I also understand the open source concept and the free software concept, I, too appreciate the efforts of those developing such product. I am also happy to pay for software that performs the task at hand. (I also understand the complexity of developing software - I spent some years as a database programmer last century)

[Leigh Semmens]

I should add that, I am aware that files in OpenSongApp appear to be in HTML, so, my best bet might be to develop some code to convert ODF to HTML.

[Sarah Dab]

Happy to help.  The OpenSong XML format is described on the 'OpenSong' site  OpenSong | File Formats , this is a separate product that shares the OpenSong XML file format with OSA.

However, my experience with OSA Options > Songs > Import a song  is that it supports

Text formats - Text (.txt), ChordPro (works for .pro, .cho, .chopro, .chordrpo)

Image formats - Image (works for .gif, .png, .jpg) and PDF(.pdf).

OpenSong XML format - OpenSongApp song (.ost),   Desktop OpenSong file (no extension)

If you have text based files in songBookPro then export to ChordPro  is perhaps an option.  ChordPro has less information than OpenSong XML but it has the song lyrics and chords and importing those is lots of the work!

You could import them one at a time but I found a work around for importing lots of chordpro files.  Put the files directly in the opensong/songs folder using a file manager, restart OSA, find a chordpro song in the song list and open it - this does a convert on the fly.  Please note that this confuses the song list into showing the converted song and the original, do a restart of OSA to sort that.

Of course, import can go wrong!

Sarah

[Gareth Evans]

There are already scripts that will batch convert odt files into text files.  These may they be imported into OpenSongApp as described by Sarah (i.e. paste them into the OpenSong/Songs/ folder and start the app - it will try to convert them when you open the song.  You can edit them to fine tune and use the autofix button in the edit page to try to guess chord lines, etc.  A quick search found this batch online odt>txt converter:

https://mconverter.eu/convert/odt/txt/

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[Leigh Semmens]

[Alistair Baty]

I have used the ImportUtility for OpenSong with great success.

Especially with batch importing. You can set the tags for title, key, first line etc and what is a chord or lyric line.

Once you have set the configuration it goes really quickly.