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Brian White Posted Not planned
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I'm not an unusual customer. I buy music on line in PDF format and I use Print Music's cumbersome method of getting my purchase into Finale notation format. That allows me to edit or shorten a song and/or set it into two facing pages for the piano. I appreciate the Export to PDF feature which is good for putting the music on to my 10 inch tablet which can be set to scroll the music automatically, but that isn't enough.  What customers like me really want, is the ability to import PDF files directly. No scanning, no converting and no subsequent editing. The $99 upgrade offer would be fantastic if we were upgrading to something we could use as described above. I for one, don't want to buy an upgrade which lacks those featurest. Finally, Print Music is great for the price. Really great, but I expected Finale 2.5 to be much better.

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MM_MICHAEL JOHNSON

HI Brian:

 

Thank you for your use of the product and posting to this community with your suggestion. At this time, we do not plan to provide a direct PDF import into any of our products. Musitek provides a PDF to MusicXML converter with their Music-to-XML app. The MusicXML can then be imported into Finale or PrintMusic. That would be your best bet.

 

Cheers,
Michael Johnson
VP, Professional Notation
MakeMusic

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PETER THOMSEN Edited
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Another option is the application PDFtoMusic Pro.

It does not work at all with a PDF made from a bitmap graphic, like e. g. JPG, TIF, GIF, PNG, &c.

 

But it works very well with a PDF from a notation program (such a PDF = a vector graphic).

 

Quoting Michael Good (ca. 7 years ago):

With PDF files printed from notation programs PDFtoMusic Pro will work better than SmartScore X Pro and other optical scanning programs. This is because PDFtoMusic Pro knows things that an OCR program can't know.

For instance, PDFtoMusic Pro knows

- that staff lines really are drawn as lines,

- that a notehead is a musical font character, rather than trying to determine a notehead from a bunch of dark pixels on a page.

This is much more accurate than optical scanning for PDFs created by a notation program like ScoreWriter. SmartScore and other optical scanners have to figure out where staff lines and noteheads are from the dots on a page, which is more error-prone.

 

The flip side is that PDFtoMusic Pro cannot handle optical scans from a scanner at all. For those you need a program like SmartScore, SharpEye, or capella-scan.

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