Changing paper size without changing page layout

• May 20, 2014 - 09:18

I wrote a choral piece (SATB w/organ) that ran to 10 pages on letter-size (8.5x11 inch) paper. Even though I think the size is easier to read compared to the various sizes of octavo paper (an industry standard for choral music), my parish music director suggested I put the score on octavo. Well, as we have determined on a support thread I started ([[nodetitle:On paper sizes]] , //musescore.org/en/node/25799 ), there is (1) no "octavo" size paper in the page settings menu (probably because there is no standard definition for octavo), nor (2) a way to scale the current layout to a different size of paper. There are times, and I'm staring at one at the moment, where such ability to scale would come in quite handy. Any chance this could be implemented in a future release (2.0 or later)? And while I'm thinking about it, what is the probability that MS could pick a typical octavo size out of thin air and standardize on it?

Thanks, all.

Comments

• May 20, 2014 - 09:27

This scaling would require the height-to-width ration to remain constant. Then the spatium setting could just follow
But you can have all this already, in the Printer Dialog.

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• May 20, 2014 - 09:52

Not a word with which I'm familiar. And just as an experiment, I attempted to print the file to a PDF. Yes, I know, I can save the file as a PDF; but that'll just use the page settings of the original score; and I don't see an override to scale to a different size of paper. Anyway, the attempt to print to the Adobe PDF driver failed spectacularly: Not only did it not scale the output to the selected paper size, running the score off the page, it also failed to render the notes properly, substituting letter names per octave. Whoa. Seriously pessimal. And then, ultimately, there will be the problem of producing something that can be folded as a booklet for conventional reading and singing. But I'm getting ahead of myself with that item.

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• May 20, 2014 - 10:10

Well, I tried another experiment, where I saved a copy of the original score to a PDF through the MS internal dialog; then I took the resultant PDF and, using a paper size called Slide 7.5x10 that was internal to the Adobe Acrobat dialogs, I printed to that and directed it to fit to the paper size. The resultant output was formatted for 7.5x10 inches and is constrained within the dimensions of the paper size. So that would work for what I want to do. I just have to make the calculations as to what size paper on which to print the resultant. I'm thinking I'm still looking at double-siding tabloid paper (11x17 in) and getting stuck trimming the output (another reason I'd rather just use 8.5x11: It prints straight up on 11x17 and won't waste paper — or money paying for the trim work).

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