John In Remote Kansas (JIRK) on LIK's cookie

I have been putting together an update of a local session book, and have done quite a bit of research (but not spending much money) on ways to put music on paper.
There are many good - and cheap - programs you can use to print music, but the one problem that comes up with most of the cheap ones is that you can only print one song per page easily.
There are probably cheap ones that let you print or save a "selection" as a graphic, but I haven't found one.
The expedient I have used is to load a PostScript printer driver and print to file using the PostScript driver. This gives you a perfectly good .EPS file, that can be used in a document.
The only problem with this is that there is no "preview" bitmap in the EPS, so you can't see what it looks like except by printing it (using a PostScript printer). A few layout programs will display a PS insert, but I've used a program called "ghostview" to clean up the EPS (adjust boundingbox, etc), and just lived with having markers in the Word document.
This isn't much help if you don't have a PostScript printer, but a surprising number of newer printers do have that ability. There are also shareware "RIP" programs, that will convert the PS to raster suitable for other printers, but I haven't looked them up recently because I have a PS printer.
For those who have access to it, it may be noted that the EPS file is an intermediate step to putting your document into PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format) which is a very good way to handle stuff.

Bottom line: if you can print it, you can print to file through a PostScript printer driver, and you get the "standard" EPS file format universally used by book printers/publishers.

It does take some minimal equipement - a PS printer or RIP program - and a friend with some experience with PS would be a big help.

If you're limited to raster printers, the suggestion would be that you concentrate on the cheaper/shareware programs. There are a number of them that are reasonably good, but any of them will take practice to use the capabilies that YOUR program has. In the under $100 (down to $25) you can do a lot with ABC, Noteworthy, PrintMusic, Allegro, etc., but each has its limitations. You can easily spend $600 for Finale, Ovation, or Cakewalk, and the same caveat applies. General rules are made to be violated.

John