Subject: RE: music notation programmes
From:
JohnInKansas
Date: 10 Aug 05 - 08:34 AM
pavane -
If you have a PostScript capable printer, you just paste the "print to file" PostScript file into a document just like you would a .jpg or .bmp. If you don't have a PostScript capable printer, the .ps file must be converted to another graphic format (I generally use .jpg) before you paste it into Word or another layout program.
The last time I checked, a couple of years ago, all QMS laser printers use PostScript as their "native language." Many new laser printers of other brands can be operated as "PostScript" printers just by installing them with a PS driver, so that they can print documents containing PostScript information; although not all of these "PostScript capable" printers produce good !PS files when you print to file through them.
As Mitch described, in a recent project I used a simple notation program to set up each tune, and printed each tune to file through an "HPIIIP+PostScript cartridge" driver. Change the default .prn filename to .ps and you've got a PostScript file of the picture. I took the additional step of opening the printfile in Ghostscript to see where to crop it, and then just editing the script (in Word) to change the bounding box dimensions. This amounts to doing the cropping directly in the script. The only "advanced" feature the notation program had was the option to select custom paper size, so I could notate so that the score essentially "filled the page" to reduce the amount of cropping needed.
Since I had a PostScript printer, I could just paste the .ps PostScript files into a Word document. Unless you do some extra steps to create a "preview," all you see in the Word document is a placeholder for the .ps picture, but when you print using a PostScript printer it's all there on the paper. If you try to print to any other kind of printer, it will print the placeholder, which doesn't do much good.
The notation program I used could print a tune, and could save a .mid file for it. Since this was a "large" book - about 800 tunes - it was well worth working up the process to create the .ps file and .mid for each tune. Lots of work - about 2400 hours for the first pass - but it's many reps of a few simple steps.
An additional step, which I have now done for that particular book, was to import each of the PostScript files into Photoshop Elements and save each as a separate .jpg file. With the .jpg pictures pasted back into the Word document in place of the .ps pictures, you can see what's going to print when you look at it in Word, and you can use the picture editing features in Word to do some resizing if needed. With .jpg pictures pasted in, you can also print on just about any available printer.
This last step means that instead of offering people a 3 pound book - with a separate floppy disk for the .mid files for each of the tunes - (minimum printing cost $19.80+ each if I had it reproduced 30 copies at a time) I can now offer them a CD with everything on it. They can look at any tune score, and play the .mid for the tune directly from the CD and/or they can print individually any scores they want; or copy and paste individual ones into their own "Session Book." The Word file that displays the "book" is hyperlinked so they can click on a tune name in the TOC or index to go directly to the score, and/or click the tune number to play the .mid.
For most people, the ability to directly export the notation program output as a graphic file would be a very good thing. Using the print-to-postscript and convert-to-graphics method requires a significant amount of trundling about on the learning curve, and does require that you have suitable programs for the individual steps.
The "power solution" of course is the one used by Mitch. Unfortunately Sibelius costs about what I'd expect to pay for my next computer...
In any Windows program, you should be able to use the Alt-PrtScn command to capture a window to clipboard, and you can paste the clipboard into most Windows programs. Unfortunately, you get a lot of extraneous stuff, so the usable image after you crop off the crud is pretty small, and it's typically at 72dpi which is a bit low for good printing. By the time you remove the window borders, only about 40% of the "capture" is usable. The ability to zoom in on the specific details you want before you capture to clipboard is essential to get any reasonable results from this method. You need to be able to capture at about 4 times the (linear) size you want in the result to get reasonably printable images. Pasting the clipboard contents directly to a decent graphics program, resizing and cropping there and saving as a .jpg that you can paste back to the layout program would be the recommended procedure, although cropping and resizing can be done directly in most programs like Word.
If a direct "export as .jpg" could be added easily, it would certainly enhance the versatility of a notation program. The problem is that most of the availabe "good" notation programs have been "enhanced" so much they're really clumsy - and often unstable - in use.
John
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sj
