Word Processing Files

If you've written your chord charts or lyrics sheets in programs like Microsoft Word, you can view those "as-is" in OnSong. However, these file types cannot be edited, formatted, or participate in low light mode. Because of the subtleties of each word processor and the author of the document, there's no way to handle perfect conversion of these into a plain-text document.

You can extract the text of word processing files within OnSong using the Song Editor and tapping on the Extract Text button in the Conversion Toolbar that appears before the on-screen keyboard is revealed. OnSong will attempt to extract the text from the file, but you will need to review and tweak the text into a file format that OnSong understands.

Here are some issues you may have with the extracted file:

Chord Spacing

A common issue with word processing documents is chord spacing. This is because most chord charts are written with chords over the lyrics with spaces used to align the chords above the correct words and phrases. When a variable-width font is used, many more space characters must be used to align chords above as compared to the lyrics below. When this is covered to plain text and viewed in a fixed-width font, you'll notice chords are pushed out to the right of the document and no longer align.

Use Fix Alignment Spaces found in the Text Tools Menu found in the Menubar of the Song Editor to bring those chords back closer to their position and then manually adjust as needed.

Unrecognized Characters

One issue with any imported file is how it handles special characters. In particular, you may find that quotation marks are replaced with strange international characters. This happens because Microsoft Word uses international characters as placeholders for these smart quote characters.

To solve this, we recommend either disabling smart quotes in the word processing application, or to export the text from your word processing document as a plain text (*.txt) document and then importing into OnSong. Alternately, you can copy and paste from the word processing application into OnSong Console and tweak the song in real time.