Recently I found a program: PDF2music and PDF2music Pro.
Both programs can convert a PDF document with music to its own music notation. It does not work with scanned images in PDF but only when a music part is converted to pdf. But there are a lot of pieces available in the right pdf format.
Both programs can export the piece to a number of formats, but only the Pro version to xml.
Both programs can be downloaded as a free version; the payed versions have more functions.
Still, the free Pro version works when you let it export just one page at a time to a corresponding xml file. This page can be transformed to NWC with the XML2NWC tool. In the end you can combine those different nwc files to one file with the whole piece. Then you can edit the piece for your own use.
To convert a NWC file to pdf you could install Libre Office Writer (free) where you can paste the pictures made with NWC. This program has a button which exports the file directly to pdf.
This PDF2music Pro program works pretty well unless you have a score in free meter with minimal bar lines. It expects a time signature and does too much calculation to render this type of score, but otherwise, for modern music with standard time signatures and measures with bar lines, it does a good job. Cleaning up bar lines and a few voicing anomalies beats entering a complete score manually.
Thanks.
Jim
I use the freeware PDFcreator program, which is essentially a printer driver. It emulates a standard printer but prints directly to PDF rather than onto paper. It can be used directly from almost any program, including Noteworthy, that has printing facilities.
melismata,
the topic was not NWC->PDF but the other way round (passing through MXML).
Flurmy, you are right about the topic of the post. However, I was commenting about the last line - which I also quoted.