Sharpeye and Niversoft's conversion of XML files to NWC files have been around for a long time. Niversoft is a free service for which I'm grateful; Sharpeye is not free but if you have a lot of sheet music to transpose in NWC, it's worth the price.
I've just found a way to use SharpEye if your sheet music is only in PDF digital form.
- My PDF program (FoxIt Phantom) allows me to export the pages to several types of image files. I expect other PDF programs will too, but I haven't checked.
- If I export a page at a high resolution and grey scale, I can open the image in SharpEye, available at http://www.visiv.co.uk/ (http://www.visiv.co.uk/).
- If a low resolution is used, SharpEye may not be able to detect the staff lines, so I suggest you export at 600 or more dpi.
- Sharpeye will then read it and create a "music" file (extension MRO) that you can export as a MusicXML file.
- The resulting MusicXML file can be dragged to https://www.niversoft.com/products/xml2nwc/#conversion (https://www.niversoft.com/products/xml2nwc/#conversion) which will convert it to a Noteworthy Text file.
- The Noteworthy Text file can be downloaded and opened in NWC for editing and further processing.
I often use GSView to open the .PDF, then I "convert" it as .BMP 2 colors (bmpmono) at 300 dpi, ready for OCR,
When the document is multipage, GSView creates a multipage .BMP, a format not so many programs can handle, so I wrote a BMP splitter (available in case someone needs it).
The rest is as David described.
If the PDF-file is made by a music programm you can use PDFtoMusic. Export to a midi-file and import it in NoteWortyComposer.
The text can also be copied.
More information at www.myriad-online.com
A heretic answer:
1. MUSESCORE (free) is capable off reading (some forms of) PDF and converting directly into its own music notation.
2. Save to .MXL (or .XML) and
3. Use Niversoft (explained above) to translate to NWCTxt.