As we’ve discussed over the past several weeks, forScore’s global search panel has gained quite a few new abilities in version 10.3. With all of these new ways of finding things, though, it’s more important than ever that the search panel remains the best and fastest way to find exactly what you’re looking for.
With that in mind, we added a new “Search” section to forScore’s settings panel that lets you control which sorts of results appear, how they’re prioritized, and more. When you open the search panel but haven’t typed any characters into the search bar, you’ll see the five scores or bookmarks you most recently viewed. That number is now customizable, so you can see as many as you like (or even none, if you prefer).
The next section in this new settings panel lets you decide how forScore finds things and which sorts of characteristics or results are most important to you. By default, forScore prioritizes score and bookmark titles, then their text (page notes or text annotations), and then their metadata. Finally, forScore presents other kinds of results such as setlists and common actions and tools. You can disable any of these things here, or you can drag them up and down to prioritize them so they show up higher in the list of results.
A new feature in 10.3 that we haven’t explored yet is related to searching, although it’s not actually found within the Search panel. When you create a new bookmark within a text-based PDF file in your library, forScore can search that PDF’s contents to see if the text you’re supplying in the Title field occurs anywhere. If it does, it lets you see each page where that text is present so you can find the right spot and set your start page with just a tap. The third section in the new search section in the settings panel lets you disable this feature if you like.
There are a lot of ways forScore can help you find what you’re looking for, but only you can decide what’s important and what isn’t based on your content and how you use forScore. These new settings help ensure that the advanced and powerful searching capabilities we’ve developed are put to good use so that you can get in, find your content as quickly as possible, and get to playing.
The Search panel’s new text results in forScore 10.3 include page notes and text annotations, as we’ve seen, but there’s a third and final source: your PDF file’s actual content.
Unlike text annotations or page notes, which are stored independently of your scores within forScore’s database, a PDF’s text is embedded within that file. Up until now, forScore hasn’t been able to peer inside files to reliably find words and phrases, but with iOS 11 it’s now possible.
There are two important caveats, however. First, PDF text searching only works for files that were created using fonts and text, not for PDFs that use images instead (like scans). Also, since forScore has to load your file into memory to look through its contents, PDF text search is limited to the file you’re currently viewing and doesn’t work across your entire library in the way that page notes and text annotations do.
Those two concerns aside, PDF text searching is a great way to find a specific page quickly and easily. No more squinting at thumbnails or jumping back to a table of contents page, just type in a few characters and you’re on your way.
Last week we saw how you can use forScore’s global search panel to find notes you’ve made per page—across your entire library—in just a few seconds. That’s not all, though, because version 10.3 also adds the ability to search the content of any text annotations you’ve made on each page. Just like with page notes, text annotation results are listed by title and page number, with your query highlighted and a bit of text surrounding it so you can get some context and make sure you’re selecting the right thing. That’s all for this week’s quick feature (those new versions don’t create themselves, you know!) but we’ll be back next Friday with even more.
Once you’ve digitized your sheet music collection and added metadata like composers and genres, finding things becomes a breeze. You can browse through forScore’s menus or use the global search panel to find scores by providing any combination of words that occur in its title or many of its metadata values.
Sometimes, though, you may remember making a note of something without remembering which score you were working with or how to get back to it. With forScore 10.3, the search panel now includes page notes (added by choosing “Notes” from the tools menu) so you can find what you’re looking for in seconds. Just type in a few characters or a phrase and you’ll see every page note that includes that query, highlighted within a larger selection of its text so you can get some context and make sure you’ve got the right thing. Tap on it to not just open the corresponding score, but to open it to that specific page.
No matter how organized your collection is, tracking down a particular page has always taken a little bit of work but now, if you’ve written something down, getting back to it is almost effortless.
September 29, 2017
Feature of the Week
The eraser isn’t the only annotation tool that got an update last week with forScore 10.3 and forScore mini 3.3—the selection tool also gained a nice new feature: tap it once to make it the active tool, then tap again to see a detail view where you can choose whether to use the original, freeform selection method, or to use rectangular selection mode instead.
With this new mode, dragging your finger around on the screen will create a rectangle that’s formed between your starting point and current point. Lift your finger and forScore selects your drawn annotations, just like before. It’s a small thing, but it’s one more way we’ve made annotation more flexible and customizable.