PDF Documents

Similar to text based lyrics Stage Traxx can also display PDF documents while playing tracks.

PDF documents are also displayed on an external screen and can be sent to network clients. Please keep in mind, that PDF files can get quite big when working with scanned documents. This could lead to problems sending large files to network clients. Therefore you can disable sending PDF document via network in settings.

Attaching a PDF to a song

To attach a PDF document to a song, open song details and tap on PDF Document in the Song Information section. Now a file browser will open and you can select any PDF file on your device or in the cloud. The PDF file will be copied into the folder PDF-Documents in Stage Traxx.

PDF documents always have precedence over text based lyrics when playing songs in the full screen player. You can still use lyrics to setup MIDI commands to be sent during playback and also to control autoscrolling of the PDF document. See the section Autoscrolling below.

To delete a PDF document from a song, either swipe the table cell to the left or on macOS right click on the cell to show a context menu:

Delete a PDF document

A PDF file can be attached to multiple songs. The file will not be deleted as long as any other song uses it. If you delete it from a song and no other song uses this file, it will also be deleted on the file system.

Viewing PDF documents

PDF documents will be displayed instead of text based lyrics in the full screen player. Depending on the PDF Scale Mode you selected in the Lyrics & PDF Settings the document will either be scaled so that the full width or full height of a page is shown in the full screen player:

PDF in full screen player

The PDF view is divided in 3 columns. If you tap on the area marked with 1 in the above screenshot, the PDF document will scroll a screen height up. Tapping in the area marked with 2 will scroll the document a screen height down. You can also scroll the document by dragging it anywhere in the view or by using pedal and assignable button actions.

To zoom in or out of the document use the pinch gesture.

The button Edit PDF Button marked with 4 in the above screenshot will open the annotation editor explained in the next section. This button is deactivated during playback.

Editing Annotations

The annotation editor can be opened either from the full screen player with the button Edit PDF Button or by tapping on the PDF Document Name in Song Information.

PDF Annotation Editor

The editor will show the selected document. You can zoom via pinch gesture if you want to create small annotations. All annotations written directly to the PDF document.

On top of the editor you can tap on Cancel to close the editor without saving or Save to close it with saving your changes. The button Clear will remove all annotations from the PDF.

The lower toolbar contains a color selector, two different pencils that will draw a solid line in the selected color and a highlighter that will draw a transparent highlight in the selected color. With eraser tool you can selectively delete one or more annotations.

Cropping a PDF

The rightmost icon in the toolbar is the crop icon. It will open a popup view with a slider that can be used to remove the page margin in a pdf document:

PDF Cropping

This setting is stored within the pdf file if you tap on Save. This means if you are sharing pdf files with network clients they will also see the cropped version of the document.

You can restore the original page margins any time by moving the slider fully to the left.

Autoscrolling

It is possible to automatically scroll PDF documents. Scrolling is controlled via tags in the lyrics editor. PDF tags have the following format:

[pdf@00:10.50: page2]

or short format

[pdf@00:10.50: page2]

Only one PDF tag is allowed per line. The time must be specified with minutes followed by seconds and can optionally contain milliseconds as well. Minutes and seconds are separated with a semicolon and the optional milliseconds by a dot.

page2 or p2 describes the the position in the PDF document that should be visible at the defined time. In the above example the document will scroll to the top of page 2 at the time 10.5 seconds.

You can also scroll to certain positions within a page. Each page is divided into 10 sections where 1 is the top, 5 the middle and 10 the bottom of the page. You can add this section by adding a dot and the section number to the above page description. Example:

[pdf@00:10.50: page2.5]

This will scroll to the middle of page two at the specified time.

A more complete example to show the different options to write these commands:

[pdf@00:30: page1.3]
[pdf@00:45: page1.6]
[pdf@01:00.50: p2]
[pdf@01:20.10: p1.8]
[pdf@01:30: p2.2]

As you can see with autoscrolling it is also possible to scroll both up and down in the document.