Musescore & Inkscape

• Apr 24, 2016 - 13:33

Ok. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I need some help.

System: Windows XP sp3 Musescore 2.02. Inkscape o.91.

I would like to work on a file in Musescore, and then complete the score in Inkscape. (I chose my words carefully here) - a full score (eg. piano) of 2 or three pages.

I have tried to search for the correct answers, unfortunately to no avail.

Would you suggest I Export as a .png or .svg file? I just tried a .png. It saved my score as two separate pages - which I would rather not have. Would I would then have join PDF files together? (Probably LOL!)

At the moment, I am looking at a file exported as a .png file, and opened in Inkscape. It doesn't look nice unfortunately. It is very similar the appearance in Adobe reader - an older version. (By the way, Musescore exported as a PDF, and then imported into Foxit PDF reader - the score looks amazing!)

My research leads to think it is a font problem. If so, then I can't seem to find the fonts. I have managed to find Bravura font 1.18, and downloaded it, but don't know what to install, or where - I assume I open up the fonts folder in Control Panel, and install - it is an otf. font (Open type) The folder also contains some .svg - will windows install these as well?

Are there other fonts I need to install? Do install these fonts under control panel in order for my scores to be easily imported into Inkscape.

If anyone is also an expert with Inkscape. Is there anything I should know about importing files and working on them.

I hope my questions make sense.

Thanks in advance.

(The score really do look amazing when viewed as PDF.)


Comments

The easiest way at the moment would be to open your pdf file in inkscape and mark the checkbox "use poppler" on the import dialog.

But you always can only import and export 1 page in inkscape. So if you exported your inkscape files to seperate pdf files you would have to use a pdf merger for combining the pages again into 1 pdf file.

In reply to by musikai

Thanks for the quick reply.

Out of interest, what does 'poppler' mean?

Just tried this (as I'm typing my response to you LOL! :)) It does work, and it looks like, if I've understood your post correctly, I can only edit one page at a time in Inkscape, and then export each page separately as a PDF, and then find a PDF merging program to merge them into one file.

Is there a solution to the .svg export, and import on Musescore & Inkscape? (Not directed at Musikai directly) . I did read that some have used Serif Drawplus 4 ( I think?) to imprt a .svg file and complete some work - but again, that relied upon installing fonts.

Is this how publishers complete their books?

In reply to by stupot101

I looked at some Musescore 2.0.2 SVGs and all the notes are already paths in the SVG. So when importing into Inkscape the score should look ok.
What problems do you have with the SVG? You shouldn't need any font.

Can you attach a SVG you are having problems with?

Inkscape can only work with 1 page at a time.
Good cheap software is Magix/Xara Photo&Graphic Designer or Magix/Xara Page Designer or Serifs, (for mac Serif's Affinity Designer must be killer!). These are multipage capable.

For creating books out of PDF files or SVG images I created my own LibreOffice/OpenOffice Template that has a lot of tools builtin:
LibreOfficeSongbookArchitect (LOSA)
http://struckkai.blogspot.de/2015/04/libreofficesongbookarchitect.html
SVG-Tools:
http://struckkai.blogspot.de/2016/02/svg-tools.html

In reply to by musikai

@Musikai Thanks for your link. Your software looks very interesting. I use Libreoffice on a day to day basis. I have the extensions for Musescore an lillypond installed already, so this is an added bonus. Thank you very much. I will have another look at the .svg import into Inkscape today, and see what it turns out. At least I now know that Inkscape only imports one page at a time (doh!)

In reply to by stupot101

ok. I just tried again to open my score in Inkscape. The first time I tried it, I exported form Musescore as a .png file, and then opened it in Inkscape. The result was not very good. I have just tried the Export from Musescore as a .svg file and opened the file in Inkscape - the results are good. The music looks excellent. However, It has opened both pages, next to each other. How do I get inkscape to open each page, rather than as one complete page - like an A3 size. I am not very good with page sizes. Or. Are there some settings in Musescore that I need to set first?

In reply to by stupot101

The svgs exported from musescore always contain all pages side by side and you can't change that. So you would need to change the document page size in inkscape and delete the stuff outside the page borders.

As this isn't muxh fun to do i created a little tool that can split the multipage svg exported from musescore 2.0.2 into multiple single page svgs. You can find this Musescore SVG Splitter under the link above called "SVG-Tools". It is a libreoffice document with embedded macro that does the work. Only for musescore 2.0.2 at the moment.

In reply to by edizioneo

Yes. The export PDF was the original advice given (and it was good :)) -but it set the pages out side by side - landscape style.

So how would I do it using Musescore > Export PDF.
Would I need to copy/paste each page into a new Musescore file, and then export each one as a PDF

Or

Is there a simple function which I am missing which can export each page from within Musescore?

Of course, I then have to rebuild the PDF files after Inkscape - probably using the software LOSongbook architect.

However, I was searching through some files this afternoon, and came across PDFTK Builder, on my portable Apps drive. I have never used it yet so it may not do exactly what I want.

By the way @maikai your musesore splitting software was a success! :) Many Thanks.

One other thought, anybody used Scribus. Doesn't this import PDF's? Would it be a way of combining a set of PDF documents? I don't know, just a thought

In reply to by stupot101

stupot101 said : "The export PDF was the original advice given (and it was good :)) -but it set the pages out side by side - landscape style."

No, the side by side was on svg export :-)

I think at first you should get an idea of what your goal is.
The usage of Inkscape is for manipulating details of a score or to edit and add graphic elements.
It isn't good for creating a book.

You can always only import 1 PDF page into Inkscape. But you don't have to split your multipage PDF into single PDFs before that. On the import dialog you can choose which page to import.

If you don't have the fonts of a PDF then you must check "use poppler" on the import dialog.

From Inkscape you also can only export single page PDFs. If you want to combine these then you need a PDF merger. For example the free commandline tool PDFtk that you can download from PDFlabs https://www.pdflabs.com/ for Linux, windows and Mac.
Since you already have PDFtkbuilder then simply use that.

If you want to create a book then you can try to use my solution (LOSA) with LibreOffice that let's you import score in image format like svg, png etc. or - and this is a special thing - you can use your original PDFs and let them automatically merge into the final PDF that you export from LibreOffice. For that PDFtk must be installed.
The great benefit is, the Libreoffice document is supersmall and fast, as all score-PDFs are external and only placeholders in the odt.

Scribus is also very good software. You can import your multipage score-PDF and all fonts will be converted to paths even if you don't have the fonts. But I only have managed to import one PDF and not found a way how to import multiple PDFs afterwards. So I think you have to exactly know what comes into your book before you start. And perhaps merge all to-be-used-PDFs before import.

So you see there a multiple ways possible even with free software. Each with its advantages and disadvantages. For example to create a TOC in Scribus is much more difficult than in LibreOffice IMHO .

In reply to by musikai

@Musikai. Sorry for the delay. Sorry, I hadn't noticed import a PDF document into Inkscape only imported one page at a time :)
Yes. I need to try and keep a consistent workflow. Musescore works perfectly for most pieces. However, I tried to engrave a piece, and nothing I tried would work for the final score (I still haven't finished anyway) I just wanted to know if my workaround Ie. editing graphically would work.
If I can complete a score in Musescore, then all well and good!
If I need to edit graphically, then I can use Inkscape (PDF import or SVG import)
If I need to create a book, then use LOSA withe LibreOffice.

Looks like I wont be using Scribus then :)

Many thanks. :)

How do I upload a pdf/jpeg file to view on this site ?

In reply to by stupot101

Click on "File attachments" at the bottom of the reply dialog.

Just some little additions:
Creating a book from multiple PDFs is also possible in Scribus. Seems you have to create a Scribus doc for every PDF you want to use (by opening the PDF in Scribus and saving as .sla.) Then you can insert and append pages frome each .sla doc to your current one.

Regarding LOSA I recommend to use the newly updated version because it is so much faster now when merging lots of PDFs.

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