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Topic: PDF to Music - again (Read 5858 times) previous topic - next topic

PDF to Music - again

Seems this subject hasn't been raised for a while. In the Myriad forums it is apparent that you can convert a pdf that has been made from a music editor eg. NWC which is a"vector" pdf, but you can't scan a pages and convert that because it is a "bitmap" pdf. So the question arises, is it possible to cinvert a "bitmap" pdf to a "vector" pdf?

Re: PDF to Music - again

Reply #2 –
Rasters and vectors are greek to me.  Try this:

Open your PDF to maximum size.  Take a screen shot (with Windows, shift-printscreen will copy the screen to your clip board).  Paste that into an image processing program (I use LViewPro).  Crop the image to get rid of what you don't want to see, then save the result in TIFF format.

Open the TIFF format file in Sharpeye, and have it create an XML file.  Use XML2NWC2 to import the result into NWC.

May not work, I'm going by vague memories of what I did once, a couple of months ago.

Re: PDF to Music - again

Reply #3 –
I'm sure I've scanned music to pdf and converted it using photoscore.

Are you sure you can't do it?

Do you want to send me a test pdf and I'll see if I can convert it ?

Rich.

Re: PDF to Music - again

Reply #4 –
Vector formats have the text preserved. You can search for words on a vector PDF. Raster PDF's (including all scanner output) just have dots (you can't search for words). To convert to vector, the dots need to be fed into OCR software and the resulting vector format will only be as good as the optical character recognition.

OCR has come a long way. It is miles ahead of speech to text and audio to MIDI.
Registered user since 1996

Re: PDF to Music - again

Reply #5 –
Thanks Rich, will attach a page. The trouble is, I have difficulty in hearing a piece of choral music.Don't play keys much, (sax,clari), so I want to hear a new piece before I lash out and buy copies for the chorus. if I'm desperate I do type up a page in NWC to see what I think, and some on-line stores have previews.

Re: PDF to Music - again

Reply #6 –
This took 15 minutes (by hand). Unless your pdf to MIDI was real accurate, you would spend more time correcting it.
Registered user since 1996

Re: PDF to Music - again

Reply #7 –
This is the result of the pdf to xml convert - and from there to NWC
Unfortunately, I can't attach the xml file but neither the xml file nor this one have been edited in any way.
So this file is a result of the output from Photoscore fed into NWC2 using Nicolas Hatier's mxml2nwc program.
After the "read", Photoscore will let you play the file at that stage. You can also edit at that stage if you want. You will note that the lyrics have also been entered into a lyric line. They also would need a degree of amendment.

Although not a real test for timing since no attempt was made to edit, this process with this test pdf page took about 2 minutes. (I think I took longer trying to navigate to where the respective files had been saved.
Rich.

Re: PDF to Music - again

Reply #8 –
Thanks Rich, that's actually quite impressive. The lyrics are a bit astray, but that's not really the object of the exercise. It means you can get a good 'feel' for a score in a couple of minutes.

Re: PDF to Music - again

Reply #9 –
What I did was import the pdf file into GIMP  and then turn it into either a tiff or a bitmap. Gimp is free and OS.  I didn't try going into Sharpeye with this, but I think I've done this before.  May have to use a bmp rather than a tiff.

Re: PDF to Music - again

Reply #10 –
Just to be clear about this,  Sharpeye does not accept pdf files as import files and you therefore have to convert first to tiff of bmp.
Photoscore accepts pdf files directly as well as tiff and bmp.

If you already have Sharpeye then you have no option than to convert to tiff or bmp first. If you have Photoscore you don't. 

If you have neither product but are considering purchasing one, then this may be a significant factor.
Rich.