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PDF Editors

Hi, all-

I want to produce a score in book form. The score will contain several suites, each with several movements. It would be really nice to have contiguous page numbering for the whole book. There are other small tweaks I want to do also, changing the measure numbers to "every 5", for example.

I would like to have the result in a single PDF file to send to a printing bureau.

It occurred to me that one way to handle all of this would be to print my NWC files to PDF files, and then use one of the PDF editors out there to join them all together and perform the various other edits I want.

Does anyone have any experience with any of these editors, especially with using them to edit PDFs of Noteworthy scores?

Peter

Re: PDF Editors

Reply #1 –
I don't have experience with any of them, but since a PDF editor is a rather exotic tool, it might be that no other NWC forum visitors have such experience, either.

What I can tell you, from my limited knowledge, is that you need to distinguish between PDF "touchup" and PDF "editing." For example, Acrobat 4 (full version, not just the reader) had a "touchup" capability. I don't know whether it was enhanced in later versions of Acrobat. The "touchup" allowed you to make minor changes, such as correcting a mis-spelled word, whiting-out text. But it did not allow you to add anything except to replace existing text. Also, it did not allow you much by way of moving things, so you could not reposition. In other words, it was not true editing, just touchup.

From an Internet search, I see that there are a number of products advertised as PDF editors. I don't know about them. One, in particular, claims that it is the only true object-capable editor that will allow you to add, remove, or reposition things, and even add text in a font not included in the original document. If the claims are true, then you should look for it (find it yourself).

Some drawing programs, such as Adobe Illustrator, can open and fully edit a PDF page as if it were a drawing. Maybe Corel Draw, too? You would need to extract pages one at a time, edit them, then reassemble. But there is free software that can do the page extraction and reassembly. If you already have such a drawing program, you might do it that way.

Re: PDF Editors

Reply #2 –
Welcome to the club. We are printing & publishing carol books, orchestral, vocal scores and parts with NWC as a base.

We have tried almost everything and the most practical is to set the work to the required page format in NWC and import the EMF files to Adobe Pagemaker. Pagemaker imports them beatifully and they can be cropped or resized to fit in situ, another page dropped in or continued. Also graphical elements can be overlayed. One of the most important features of Pagemaker is that it 'knows' the EMF file. It reproduces it exactly as it be printed frm NWC. Other programs don't always.
Size is no problem either it can handle 100page+ books with ease and it has a book making facility so that separate works can be combined together.

Re: PDF Editors

Reply #3 –
Postscript: we print to PDF from Pagemaker. Normally we set work in A4 which can be scaled to letter size at printing. We also use B4JIS and A3.

Re: PDF Editors

Reply #4 –
I'd love to be able to use Pagemaker, but it's way beyond my means. Even the ~$100 PDF editors are a little pricey for this project, but if anyone can tell me that they do the job, well then I'd be interested in giving them a try.

I tried importing an NW *EMF file into the OpenOffice draw programme and the results weren't good enough. When I print from this programme, some of the elements seem to be shifted vertically ever so slightly, so the resulting print quality is not satisfactory.

After my first posting, I have discovered that NWC2 (and perhaps earlier versions) can start page numbering anywhere, so I can manage my contiguous page numbering wish.

I can use the Boxmark font to insert bar numbers every five bars, and really all that remains is the need to create a single PDF file from the many that NWC is going to give me.  I see that there is a PDF merge utility out there - perhaps that's all I really need.

Re: PDF Editors

Reply #5 –
Hi Peter,
I've just done a very quick test printing from:
  • NWC2
  • OOo 1.1.4 - copy to clipboard from NWC2 preview and paste into text document
  • OOo 1.1.4 - copy to EMF from NWC2 preview and paste as graphic into text document
  • OOo 1.1.4 - copy to EMF from NWC2 preview and paste as graphic into drawing document
They all came out just fine...  I didn't notice any vertical shifting.  Of course, as I didn't bother to try and match margins, the OOo versions were scaled down a little but this was to be expected.

Are you up to version 1.1.4 of OOo?  Perhaps they have fixed something?  Or perhaps my quick and dirty test file wasn't complex enough?
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: PDF Editors

Reply #6 –
Simple- just get pdf995Edit free download. If you activate it, each time you print to pdf it adds the page to the existing file so you end up with one multipage pdf. Have used for choir books etc. You can also download free pdf995 which just puts a pdf printer in your printer folder. When you go to print just nominate pdf995 and it will produce a pdf file. Together with the pdf995 edit complete solution to songbook.
A couple of tips though. These programs bring up ads so use them offline and just cancel the explorer popup when it shows.Bit annoying but for free? I can live with that.I use a 3 button mouse and the the third button is set to"close program" so I just click when the pop-ups occur.
Other tip is that when doing the final"print" make sure you have already set the pdf995 as printer because as most people know, the print setup with NWC is peculiar to an individual printer.Canon, HP etc printers all set the page differently and so does the pdf.
Final tip, when you have finished making your book don't forget to uncheck the box on PDFEdit otherwise all subsequent jobs will continue to be stuck there. If you want any advice please feel free to email me at llucyyMISSISIPPIMUD@tpg.com.au ( you know what to leave out!)

Re: PDF Editors

Reply #7 –
I've been using pdf995 for years, and I'm very happy with it. You can get rid of the advertising by paying a small one-time fee.

As far as merging the pdf files goes, I was unaware of pdf995edit - I'll have to look into it. I did discover a relatively cheap product called PDF Split-Merge, which seems to be able to merge pdf files. I guess that I'm out of the woods!

Thanks to all for their suggestions.

Re: PDF Editors

Reply #8 –
Rather than using a PDF editor which is not really targeted for the purpose it is probably much easier to assemble the pages in Open Office or Word and print to PDF from there. Editing can be done so much easier.

For small booklets Publisher 97 works well and other have reported Publisher 2003 as OK for booklet printing, that is where two pages are being printed on one spread. Open Office needs to be tested. It couldn't handle a 40 page book.

Where simple double sided non-booklet printing is to be done there is little problem. The pages can be inserted sequentially. Some programs allow resizing or cropping, so that when you want to run on items, you can import a whole page and take what fits on the balance of the page, similarly on the following page. Which is much easier than trying to force page breaks in NWC. It gives more style options too.

If you are having problems importing EMF files an easy way to get from NWC is to print to postscript and extract the pages as bw graphic files in Ghostscript. Printing direct to PDF is not recommended as few programs can import a PDF file. printing to PDF is best reserved for the final stage where a permanent portable small print file is required.

Re: PDF Editors

Reply #9 –
Conversion to other formats from NWC is rather difficult. So I found more easier to use LaTeX and the MuSiXTeX extension. Of course you'll have to retype your scores but the result in PostScript is very good and you can also make PDF documents even if the definition is a little less good (that's my opinion!).
I use NWC to create MIDI on my web site and the music scores I propose are created using LaTeX (by the way, free!) (I chose PostScript because files are less great than in PDF and the quality is better). You can take a look:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Thierry_Klein/
(scores at:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Thierry_Klein/recueil/)
Hope you'll be interested.

Re: PDF Editors

Reply #10 –
I create whole books of music with NWC and PDF files.  I use Acrobat Distiller as the "printer" in NWC.

For each page or group of pages, the appropriate page number is specified in NWC's page-options tab. I create a small, temorary page.pdf document.  Then I import those pages into a larger PDF score using a full version Acrobat 4.0 and its document-insert-page command.

Re: PDF Editors

Reply #11 –
I usually provide the printing company hard copy, not the PDF file.

Despite selecting printer properties, "press," and "optimize for portability," the printing company's output doesn't quite get all the fonts needed to make a good looking score.  Flats and sharps, in particular, look a bit strange.