Thanks for using OnSong!

OnSong has tools that can extract text from a variety of file formats.  The quality of this process depends solely on the source material.  Each file format that you extract text from may have different problems.

PDF files are designed to reproduce a printed page so how the information is stored can vary greatly.  Text may be placed using text boxes and spaces.  The file can also be.akin to a drawing of a chord chart, or be scanned from paper.  In these cases, OnSong must submit the file for optical character recognition or OCR.  This is where a computer attempts to reach the image for text like how a human would interpret marking into meaning.  Depending on the quality of the scan, this can result in strange characters or misunderstood words or phrases.

Word processing files are typically text-based, but are typically written to place chords using spaces.  Most chord charts are formatted with a variable-width font which means that a space character is much narrower than other alphabetic characters like the "M" for instance. This means that the author of the document likely used many more spaces to place the chord compared to characters in the lyrics below.  OnSong is not aware of these sorts of authoring decisions which can cause alignment issues in the resulting text-based chord chart.

Please know that while OnSong can extract text, it cannot automatically format that text into a compatible format since it is not possible to handle the authoring techniques of thousands of chord chart writers.  We recommend watching the Overview Tutorial video http://onsongapp.com/videos/overview and be prepared to finesse the document into the OnSong file format once the text has been extracted: http://onsongapp.com/docs/features/formats/onsong

You can also find many video tutorial that provide tips and tricks for formatting on our videos page: http://onsongapp.com/videos

Hope that helps!