The song viewer takes up the entire screen with the status bar, menubar, and live bar residing on top of your content. This allows those user interface components to move out of the way without interrupting what you see on the screen.
Viewing Files
The way that OnSong displays your song depends on the type of file that was imported. OnSong works best with text-based chords and lyrics. This is because it lets OnSong format the way these documents look as well as detecting chords for rendering chord diagrams or transposition. OnSong can also import other file formats that are converted into text-based files.
OnSong can also display many other file formats including PDF and Microsoft Word (you can view all file types attached to a song using the Attachments Menu). But files like PDF's and Microsoft Word docs are viewed "as-is" in the song viewer using the built-in iOS/iPadOS web viewer. This means that you can't make changes to the formatting of the song. It also means that chords are not detected so they can't be displayed as chord diagrams, transposed, or otherwise interacted with using the interface. You also can't use low light mode on these file types.
Scaling and Positioning
Similar to other mobile applications, you can use touch gestures to interact with the content. For instance, you can tap and drag to move the content in the viewer. You can also perform the pinch gesture with a finger and thumb to zoom the content in and out.
Navigating Songs and Sets
OnSong displays the song in the viewer and lets you scroll through the song vertically by swiping up and down, similar to how you can view other content on mobile devices. OnSong aligns song content vertically in the song viewer. This means that if you are viewing a PDF file, the second page is displayed under the first page. This is done to integrate more readily with autoscroll. Songs are placed horizontally in the song viewer. This means that swiping to the left or right will move through songs in your selected collection, book, or set.
OnSong also features navigation zones. This means that tapping on the top or bottom of the song will scroll the song up or down a percentage of the screen height. You can also tap on the left or right of the screen which will navigate to the previous or next song in the viewer. You can also tap in the middle of the song viewer to toggle the menubar visibility, or double-tap in the middle to zoom the view in and out.
Inspecting Chords
If you're using a text-based chord chart, and if those chords are being detected properly, you can tap on the chords displayed in the song viewer to open the Chord Inspector. This will display diagrams for that chord in multiple instruments. You can also tap on the speaker icon on this screen to have the chord playback as you select various diagrams. This can be used to hear how the chord is supposed to sound which can be handy for practicing more complex variations.
Selecting Sections
Another advantage to using text-based files in OnSong is that you can tap on them to select them when you are projecting lyrics, controlling other devices with OnSong Connect or OnCue, or if you have MIDI or scenes mapped to the section. Otherwise, tapping on a section will have no effect since it would interfere with navigation zones and hot corners. You can change this behavior by adjusting the Select Tapped Sections setting.
Hot Corners
You can see that there are plenty of ways built into the song viewer to interact with your content, but if you need to do more during a live performance, there are ways to use this large screen interface to perform actions when you tap in the corner of the screen. For instance, you may want to set a hot corner to send MIDI events to provide a dry mix on your microphone or mute channels on a MIDI-enabled sound console or PA system. With over 140 actions, the opportunities are virtually boundless.