What is the best way to produce a cheat book for about 300 scores?

• Dec 16, 2020 - 08:20

That type of book:
book.png


Comments

Use MuseScore 2 and its Album feature.
Or export all to PDF and use PDFSaM to glue the PDFs together (my current solution, for a 400+ 1-2 pages scores songbook)

Or for the above example use section breaks and horizontal frames

In reply to by frfancha

To be clear: the albums feature has nothing to do with generating those "incipits" (the technical term for what you are calling a "cheat book". it's just a way of combining the scores themselves. Generating incipits needs to be done manually - or at least, using some other tool. Probably if you export all your scores to MusicXML format, someone could write a script in music21 that would generate a new set of incipits like that and somehow combine them and export them. Or maybe a plugin could, within MuseScore.

In reply to by frfancha

I think you will have quite some work. The example you showed was created with ABC and some scripts (explained on website).
Getting such done with a certain quality will require either a lot of know-how or a lot of work.
Musescore itself doesn't support 2 columns but out of curiousity I tried to fake it:
Fake_2_columns.png
To get this done with 300 snippets will become a nightmare :-)
Every time you insert a time signature all following bars will be rewritten and become a mess. Inserting key signatures will require you to hide stuff and correct barlines etc. Getting the white gap into the middle requires widening the spacing of the bars of the left column by eye sight.
And finally if you have forgotten one piece and want to add it afterwards you will start screaming :-)

Short: I wouldn't do it. If I were to have such done I would use LibreOffice and images of the beginnings and write a macro. Or try export as musicxml, convert to ABC and use the scripts like described in the original source on the website.

Attachment Size
Fake_2_columns.mscz 12.85 KB

Getting the left column at the correct size within MuseScore might prove hard.

A possible workaround is to create your score on custom paper of only half the width and export that to PDF.
Then using a PDF viewer, print again to PDF and combine them back onto a single page?

Here's an example done with Adobe Acrobat Viewer (choose "custom" page combine settings and set to 2:1 ratio).

Attachment Size
2columnTest.mscz 4.68 KB
2columnTest-merged.pdf 20.06 KB
2columnTest.pdf 13.29 KB

In reply to by jeetee

Quite honestly, I see the need for a programmer. Or, someone who's proficient with desktop-publishing software and the automation thereof. You would drive yourself crazy, methinks, trying to do the assembly of the final document directly in MuseScore. There's GOT to be a better way to do that final step . . .

You ought to be able to concern yourself with filling out 300 accurate records in some kind of computer database, then "push the button" to do the tedious part in a matter of seconds.

Are all the scores already uploaded onto musescore.com? Do you want the scores to be able to play back from the cheat sheet. If so, you can do this with a webpage but you will need the URL of each score.

Do you still have an unanswered question? Please log in first to post your question.