Making a final pdf file of a score
Well, thanks to all of you wonderful people, I have a composition finished using Musescore. So I am at the stage of asking questions of putting together the .pdf file.
From what I can tell so far, the Musescore menues allow you to create a title and the composer's name and these are formatting at the top of the first page of music.
However, other pages are needed in the final .pdf file.
(1) List of instruments
(2) For an opera or cantata (this is an act of an opera, but it can be performed as an independent cantata), a list of the characters
(3) A page stating that the text of the libretto comes from a particular book and is reprinted with the permission of the owners of the copyright.
There is one situation in which I have to put lower case Roman numeral page numbers on these preliminary pages.
There is another situation in which I have to take the preliminary pages and the score and combine these with a long document into a set of volumes with consecutive page numbers. So the page number of the music doesn't start with 1, but something like 475. (This is for the full dissertation).
When Musescore writes a pdf file, is that an editable file? How do I get the other pages into the file? I personally do not have the Adobe program for creating documents, as far as I know. I think the software I have, i.e., the software downloaded for free, is for reading documents. So I am not sure exactly what software I have to get access to,
The full dissertation is in Word, so I have to start with a long Word document, then follow it with this score. and the page numbers of the score would start where the page numbers of the document leave off. I assume I have to get rid of the Word page numbers and get Adobe to make all of the page numbers.
Thank you for any advice.
Comments
In MuseScore 1.0, you can start the page numbering at any number in Layout -> Page settings -> First page number.
You can save a PDF from File -> Save a copy -> choose pdf as filetype.
Adobe Acrobat is the top of the line to edit PDF documents. If you can't have access to it, you can use a website to merge PDF documents together
I have exactly the same need: making a composite PDF document including the PDF generated by MuseScore and other stuff prepended and appended to it.
A solution I'm totally happy with is to convert all the pieces to PDF (using MuseScore own conversion for scores and the word processor PDF export for other stuff) and then to use PDFsam (which stands for "PDF Split And Merge"); it can be downaloaded here , the home web site is here , it is open source.
PDFsam can be used both interactively, with a graphical interface, and from a command line (or in batch files). The former allows to familiarize with the concepts and understand the working, the latter allows to completely automate the process.
It may chain several .PDF or parts of them (down to individual page sequencing) into a single .PDF (it may also split a .PDF into parts, which perhaps does not apply to you). It DOES NOT renumber the page (in a PDF, page numbers are actually regular text, not recognizable as a special field), so the pages should be numbered correctly in the original files, but for the rest it can do almost anything you can think of (and something I never thought of!).
PDFsam requires a full Java installation and has a few small quirks (particularly under Windows); but relying on Java makes it instantly platform-independent.
I suggest to try it and to invest a day or so in exploring it; if you are going to have this kind of needs repeatedly, in the long run it may spare you a lot of work and time.
M.
P.S.: I am not connected with PDFsam staff in any way; I simply am a happy user.
In reply to PDFsam by Miwarre
fyi: acrobat.com supports editing/combining pdf files too