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Topic: Making PDF's of NWC's ? (Read 6222 times) previous topic - next topic

Making PDF's of NWC's ?

Hi,

I'm looking for a way to make pdf's of nwc's, without first printing and scanning it in.

The copy button in Print Preview does not help.

Any suggestions ?

Re: Making PDF's of NWC's ?

Reply #1 –
There are many PDF creators out there including a few free ones.
FreePDF comes to mind - you might try searching for that.
I use Jaws PDF Creator which came free on a magazine CD.

These programs install as a virtual printer.
When you come to print out your score there will be a PDF printer in your printer dialogue box.
You output the score as you would to paper but instead of printing you will be asked to nominate a location for the output file.

The file created can be read with Acrobat Reader.
You will need a PDF creator that allows the embedding of fonts so that anyone who opens your file wont have to have the NWC font on their system.
Most PDF creators allow font embedding.

Try searching for PDF virtual printer and see what you find.

Re: Making PDF's of NWC's ?

Reply #2 –
-
My choice of free PDF creator has been PDF Creator for a while, which seems to be working without any noticeable problems and producing decent results. It installs itself as a printer and all you need to do is printing your document using that printer.

However, my standard way of producing printable scores involves post editing the EMF output (Print Preview > Copy) of NWC2 in OpenOffice drawing application, which can export directly as PDF.

Hth!
_

Re: Making PDF's of NWC's ?

Reply #3 –
I've used PDF Creator a lot, and still do.  It's slow, but works very well.  If you have a big print job, be prepared for it to take a couple minutes or longer.

Re: Making PDF's of NWC's ?

Reply #4 –
The post editing by Ertugrul of the EMF is most interesting.
I have tried this with Open Office but the PDF from that program resizes the image, slightly, but significantly.
Also it cannot always be opened in Ghostscript which I need to convert pages to BMP file for any detailed graphic editing.

Does PDF creator produce a file which can be read by all programs? I have had trouble when the subsequent re-conversion back to PDF bombed out.

[I use Acrobat 3 Distiller when I need PDF's and normally create the postscript file using an old Microsoft/Adobe printer driver that came with Publisher 97.]

Re: Making PDF's of NWC's ?

Reply #5 –
Is there a way you can chaneg, or edit pdf files, such as changing a wrong note made , or changing texts? In other words, someone else has made a pdf music file: can I re-convert back to NWC and cahnge tezts and notes?

Thanks,
Philip (Micahel)

Re: Making PDF's of NWC's ?

Reply #6 –
There is a program to convert PDF to EMF but the version I tried didn't work reliably. Some very expensive commercial programs may do that job.

PDF's can be converted to bitmap graphic files (BMP) in Ghostscript. Then the BMP file can be edited. A 600 dpi black & white image prints very well.

Re: Making PDF's of NWC's ?

Reply #7 –
you can also be interested in pdf995 :)

HTH!

Re: Making PDF's of NWC's ?

Reply #8 –
In response to Philip Dykes.

Making changes to a PDF is fairly easy.
1. Open the PDF in Ghostscript and convert to bmp mono 600dpi [or greyscale or colour if needed.] Use the bmp option, although it gives bigger files because at this intermediate stage it never fails to work.

2. Open the bmp file is a suitable graphics program and make whatever are needed. I use Ulead's PhotoImpact [v.7] where I can do overlays and work with objects and keep them in libraries if needed. This means I can print out something from NWC and save it ultimately as overlayable object. In PhotoImpact I can pickup, say, a note and put it down elsewhere or enter a text item.

3. Save as required. I will use tif for pagemaker, otherwise for PDF print from PhotoImpact to your favourite PDF driver. My usual one, which never fails to work, is a postscript driver that came with MS Publisher 97. Used with Acrobat Distiller it seems bomb prrof. Unfortunately some of the PDF files created don't seem to be the same so that thet are not all recognised.

Re: Making PDF's of NWC's ?

Reply #9 –
I use PDF995.  It's free, but if you want to avoid the "annoy" screens, I feel it's worth paying for it.  It costs $9.95 (get it?  PDF995), but I also ordered the package which includes PDFEdit.  I've found that in a number of cases, it has actually created better PDF's than Adobe Acrobat itself (sometimes the fonts get messed up in Adobe).  It installs as a print driver, so to use it all you do is print your file, choose PDF995 as the printer, give it a file name, and voila, you've got a PDF created.  I would recommend also getting the PDFEdit add-on, as well.  It allows you to configure PDF995 to do append printing (so you can print a page or a number of pages at a time if necessary and append to an existing PDF).

Hope this helps.

John

Re: Making PDF's of NWC's ?

Reply #10 –
I use pdf995 and have no problem making pee-dee-effs from NWC files. I do have something of a problem embedding NWC files in Open Office Writer text files: the NWC files are reduced in size more than I want. I use Ghostscript and gswrite with pdf995 and pdfEdit, and can do most of what I want. There has been a problem with making pdf's using recent versions of Ghostscript and gswrite with your distiller: they won't shrink the source page to fit. A new beta version is supposed to fix this.

Stephen