PDF MIDI Control
First pass at MIDI control of PDF scroll position. Sending CC 90 scrolls to the cc value’s page number.
Demo
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HTML for show notes - love it. Mulitple views - love that as well.
This seems to be a killer concept.
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Thank @mavriq, I agree, I think there’s real potential here, but to clear, for the moment it only supports images, video and PDFs. The plan going forward is to provide a simple text file format for generating HTML content - probably similar to markdown, but with additional directives to more tightly integrate with Cantabile’s states etc…
Also, at the moment, this is all external to Cantabile, eventually I’d like to more tightly integrate it with Cantabile, so it’s less cumbersome to setup (not that it’s particularly hard to setup as is)
Brad
More PDF MIDI Control
Rather than use a different CC for every operation I’ve implemented a single command CC (93) that scrolls the document according to the value you send it. I’m not sure about this approach but works for now at least.
Sending these values to CC93 performs these operations:
- 1: line up
- 2: line down
- 3: half page up
- 4: half page down
- 5: page up
- 6: page down
- 7: home
- 8: end
- other: no-op
These scroll sizes are based on screen size, not PDF page size. ie: a page down operation scrolls by the screen height - not the height of a single PDF page. I might add commands for “next page”, “prev page” which might be more useful in some cases.
Also, at the moment, I’ve enabled smooth scrolling so the document slides as it scrolls. Some might prefer instant scrolls - perhaps I’ll add an option for that.
Finally, the intention here is not really to map controller bar buttons to scroll operations - more likely you’ll use state transitions or MIDI hardware buttons/knobs to control the scrolling.
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I do not use show notes myself (other than in my head) but this sounds an interesting development
Two new commands for CC93:
- 9: previous marker
- 10: next marker
Down the track I think marker will take on deeper meaning but for the moment with PDF files it simply means the PDF page number.
So, sending CC93 = 10 will scroll to the next PDF page (as opposed to paging down by one screen height).
I just tried 0.0.9 - rendering is superb, and I’m pleased to report that we used the media server at a gig this past week and it worked flawlessly - thank you so much for your effort.
I could see two changes to Cantabile that could be really useful when combined with the server
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For automated “next page” type of commands, Cantabile requires a separate trigger at each point where it needs to move forward (e.g. at 23 1.000 move to page 2, at 31 1.000 move to page 3 …). Many more might be needed if automated “scroll by one line” commands are desired, e.g. for displaying lyrics. Could be nice to have a single “multi-trigger” that you could give a list mapping position to page or line commands. Or for lyrics “set scroll speed”, “start scroll”, “stop scroll”.
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When I’m at a gig I use most of the screen for notes, but need the controller bar for display of time, master volume, measure and for access to some capabilities (e.g. display set list for next song selection). If this were replaced with a browser I’d lose the controller bar and my limited screen space would be reduced by the usual stuff that appears at the top of a browser window. What about an embedded browsing capability (e.g. github/webview or webview2) as an option inside the notes page?
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Yes Markdown would be great. Easy for most people to use. It would be nice if one of the varients is supported so we would get Tables and Color as well.
Awesome!
Rather than a list of positions, I was thinking of timed transitions. eg: start here and end up here in N bars/beats/seconds time.
Yep, I’m aware of this and I think I mentioned above somewhere about embedding a webview in Cantabile. That’s down the track a little… right now I’m just trying to get the tech stack right (nodejs server, web front end, MIDI control, PDF rendering, new show notes format etc…).
Once that’s sorted, I’ll streamline its integration with Cantabile.
I haven’t decided what the actual format will be.
Whatever it is I’ll need to write the parser/formatter for it because it definitely has requirements above and beyond what Markdown can do. But… I’ve written a Markdown processor before and it’s not trivial job to do correctly because there’s a lot of weird edge cases that I’d prefer not revisit. So at this stage, best I can say is it will be “markdown like” or maybe “markdown inspired”.
Brad
Might work. One of the songs I’m thinking of as a test is Nightwish’s Meadows of Heaven. Starts with a minute or so of instrumental solo before the singer starts, and there are several other places in the song with no singing, so scrolling would need to start/stop accordingly.
If you would create your own syntax, it might be worth also implementing an editor for it in VSCode that can help out.
antlr works best for structured languages. Markdown is not really structured and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen attempts to do an antlr grammar for markdown haven’t gone well.
Possibly - some sort of syntax highligh colouring at least would be nice.
Did a little looking and that seems to be correct. I also looked around at the current markdown parsers out there; they didn’t add many features but had many, many revisions. I think this may indicate the difficulty of implementing a markdown parser.
Perhaps markdown may not be the best choice despite it’s “simplicity”. Maybe there are better options available that are newer? Not sure if anything else fits the bill. Perhaps a VERY scaled down html4 would work? There are plenty of editors out there if someone needs hand holding. In some respects html4 and markdown are very similar, however html4 has many more open source parsers, editors etc to to start from.
Actually, I’ve been looking at marked.js which has some good extensibility points. I’m thinking a simple preprocessor for cantabile specific directives and everything else markdown should work pretty well.
Nice, supports raw html and tables as it supports Github extensions. And it’s usable client side and via Node.js etc.
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Stupid question, but I couldn’t find it in the videos, blogs or forum - how do I setup a Loopback MIDI? Only thing I see now is my MIDI keyboard.
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Hi @mtirion,
you can find some info here
Anyway, to get the Loopback ports, if that’s what you want (I hope I understood correctly) you have to select “Show loopback ports” in Tools->Options->Miscellaneous
Gabriel
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