Managing hundreds of scores that will be compiled into a hymnal
Hello,
I'm going to be making a hymnal. I'm looking for the best way to manage what will be hundreds of scores for each hymn which will eventually be compiled into a PDF or some such.
I think making one massive document would a bad idea. It would be slow and a pain to navigate. But the benefit would be that any formatting changes would apply to everything and I could. But let me know if you think Musescore can handle a document that would likely be thousands of measures long.
The other option is individual files for each hymn. This is safe, but it also has big drawbacks. How do I combine the scores afterwards? Making an individual PDF for each hymn and combining afterwards would not work since often two hymns will share a page. Not to mention the pain of managing formatting changes between documents.
So in summary here are the things I would need in an ideal world:
Ability to rearrange hymns.
Have formatting changes apply to everything automatically.
Hymns share pages when there is room.
So what would be the best way of going about making a hymnal?
Comments
Use different files and use something like the free PDFSaM (don't use Adobe Publisher or some such, it is a) pretty expensive, b) slow like a dog and c) creates a much larger file) to glue the exported PDFs together to a single PDF.
I've done that for a ~400 pages/scores songbook (and with MuseScore 1), PDFSaM creates a combined PDF whithin a few seconds (Adobe needs an hour)
In reply to Use different files and use… by Jojo-Schmitz
PDFSaM sounds very useful, so thank you for that recommendation. However, stitching PDFs won't work for me because that necessitates that each hymn be its own page which will leave a lot of useless whitespace in the end.
In reply to PDFSaM sounds very useful,… by Peter Yost
Those that should share a page could be combined in the score already. That's what I did with my songbook too.
I do believe that musescore can handle large files - depending on the computer - but at the expense of speed. That's why you should stick to manageable scores.
In reply to If you have small scores,… by HildeK
And/or a style file that you import into all scores
I use Power PDF Advanced (150 EUR) to combine individual pdf-files into one pdf-file. If there is a need, you can also split pdf files with Power PDF or just move one or more pages from one file to another. Power PDF has almost the same set of features as Adobe Acrobat Professional but is faster.
If you really want to combine long and short hymns, text, pictures automated heading numbering, cover sheets with text etc, i think Lilypond with LyLuaTeX is the way to go. I've only used it for one pice, but I've seen song-books with many hundred songs