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Settings

Planned
  • rebinding the keyboard shortcuts

Profile​

This is where the account is, and it is the only place in the app that is. What an account is for, and what each tier gets, is its own chapter: Account.

You can manage your login and synchronization in this section:

  • Login / logout, and adding a second sign-in method to the same account
  • Buttons for Google Drive synchronization
  • Premium: switch for real-time synchronization
  • Manual sync: back up the whole library to a file, or bring one back in

Sending a few songs to somebody else is a different job. That is export & import, and it lives with the songs, because choosing which songs is the whole act. Settings links there.

Drive access is asked separately

Signing in with Google does not hand Achordeon your Drive. That permission is asked the first time you back up to Google Drive, and it covers only the backup file itself. See your account & Google data.

Application​

  • theme - system, light, dark, FUTURE: colors
  • dark page - off unless you turn it on. With it on, every song the app draws goes light-on-dark while the app itself is dark: performing, watching, and the previews in Songs and Songbooks. The Dark page button overrides it where it appears: in the performing bar for that one performance, in the audience menu for that one viewing, and under the songbook pages for that book — the print preview says it is no longer showing the print output while it is dark. It is per device, and printing, PDFs, downloads and your audience are never touched by it
  • language - EN, CS
  • usage statistics - off unless you turn it on, and the same switch as the one on Privacy
  • panel size - one size everywhere, or let each module remember how you sized its split view on its own

Rendering​

The renderer allows you to customize the output. There is global setting and scoped one.

Songs scope. The controls are grouped into Page, Title, Fonts and Chords:

  • Page: scale (custom text size, useful for maximizing the page space), columns (for really long songs), aspect ratio, padding (the white border around the song), block gap (the air between a verse and a chorus — closing it up is often what fits a long song on one page, because with scale on Auto the room you take out comes back as bigger text), and where a song that doesn't fill the page sits, horizontal and vertical
  • Title: position (on top of the page or sideways up the side) and layout (the subtitle stacked under the title or inline beside it)
  • Fonts: the face the song itself is set in — lyrics, chords and labels — and the one the title and subtitle share. The title can be told to follow the song, which is what it does unless you say otherwise. Every choice is a font this device really carries, so what you see is what a PDF prints
  • Chords: the same colour, size and notation a songbook can set, here for a single song

A single song can override anything. A songbook only carries the shared few below.

One song, one page

The render settings exist to make the content fit one page.

Songbooks scope:

  • block gap - the air between blocks, set once for every song in the book
  • chords color
  • chords size
  • chord notation - English (C, D, B) or German (H for B natural, B for B♭). It changes how chords are printed, but your song is left exactly as you wrote it, so switching back changes nothing else. [H] has always been understood as B natural whichever you pick, and English simply prints it as B, so a song that mixes the two spellings comes out in one language either way.
  • song font - the face the songs themselves are set in. Set it on a songbook and every song in it follows.
  • title font - the face the title and subtitle are set in: the song's own font, or any other. Set it on a songbook and every song in it follows.

Font library​

Settings ▸ Font library lists every font this device can set a song in — the ones Achordeon ships with, and any you add yourself.

Add a font searches Google Fonts by name — pick a result and it is added — and also takes a .ttf file, or a link. The link can be the embed address Google Fonts hands you, or a direct .ttf address on jsDelivr or raw.githubusercontent.com. Whichever way, the font is downloaded once and kept on the device, so it works offline from then on and nothing is fetched while you are reading a song.

Some things worth knowing:

  • One file is one style. Adding the regular does not add the bold — add that as a second file. A style you never add is borrowed from another font, and Settings says which one; you can change where it is borrowed from.
  • A font stays on the device you added it to. It travels in a backup, because that is your whole library. It does not travel in an export: that file names the fonts your songs use so the person opening it knows what to install, and never carries the font itself.
  • Removing a font is safe. Songs set in it go back to the default and come back to it the moment you add it again.
  • TrueType only. .otf files are turned away, because half of them hold outlines a PDF could not print — and a font that looked right on screen and came out wrong in print is the one failure worth refusing up front.
  • The four Achordeon ships with cover the Latin alphabets. They are cut back to those to keep the download small, so a song written in Russian or Greek prints empty boxes. Add a font that has those letters and it will print them.

Backup​

Save your whole library, and bring it back later. This is the entire database, not a selection, different from exporting a few songs to share.

A backup can live in either of two places, and they are the same backup:

  • a file you keep wherever you keep files
  • your Google Drive, if you would rather not hold the file yourself

Bringing one back asks what it should do, because a backup serves two jobs:

  • Add to my library - the backup's songs and songbooks land beside yours. Where you have both, the newer one wins. Your settings are left alone.
  • Replace everything - the library goes back exactly as the backup has it. Anything not in the backup is lost, your settings included.

The question is the same whether the backup came from a file or from Drive, and so is the answer.

Add is the one you usually want

Replace is for putting a machine back the way it was. If you are after songs from an old backup, Add gets them without touching anything you have written since.

Backup is not sync

Sync keeps one library the same on every device you sign in on, continuously, with no file involved. A backup is a copy you make and choose when to bring back. Sync will faithfully copy a deletion to your other devices. A backup is what still has the song afterwards.