Publishing a book with Muse?
Anyone have experience laying out a book with MuseScore? The music notation is quite complete, however I wonder about the other components of a text. For example paragraphs of plain text for instruction. Or importing images (like keyboard images) or tables. Anybody have experience with this? What was your work flow?
Comments
Add text frames to include plain text. Copy images and paste in MuseScore. You can check out some of the scores by @BSG to see how it's done.
While this is theoretically possible, I wouldn't recommend doing it this way for a book of any significant length. MuseScore just isn't a word processor and lacks basic feature like word wrap, automatic pagination of text, paragraph styles, etc. Instead, I would recommend using MuseScore to create the musical examples then using the image capture tool (camera icon on toolbar) to take snapshots you can paste into your favorite word processor.
@BSG has indeed done some pretty amazing work doing things directly in MuseScore, see for instance https://musescore.com/bsg/continuo3. That's the sort of thing I personally would have used a word processor for, but it's great having the final product be interactive. I've done a much smaller-scale version of that sort of thing, see instance https://musescore.com/marcsabatella/inversion-and-voicing
In reply to While this is theoretically… by Marc Sabatella
Here is the problem, you can create just one page. I tried to create an entire chapter with examples, but was impossible add different textures, I mean, four bars of piano, four bars for single instrument, four bars for string quartet. In the same file is simply impossible Any solution??
In reply to Here is the problem, you can… by pavelasco
As discussed in the earlier posts, create the examples as individual images and add them to a text document created in a word processing app. Have Musescore do the things it is good at (producing musical notation) and combine that capability with another app that is good at producing text documents.
In reply to As discussed in the earlier… by SteveBlower
As I see, why do I need a text processor, MuseScore can do it well..... I need interactive worksheet for my students, for this reason word is not an option.
In reply to Here is the problem, you can… by pavelasco
Actually, it's easy enough to change the number or type of staves from example to example - just turn on Format / Style / With empty staves so the instruments you are not using for any given example don't appear. But still, for all the other reasons stated, exporting your examples as graphics and then importing into a Word processor will provide more flexibility in general, especially with respect to the text.
In reply to Actually, it's easy enough… by Marc Sabatella
Well, I´m a web designer, the text is a piece of cake. But as composer add a string quartet and a piano grand staff in the same page is my goal today.... Maybe you recorded something like that?
In reply to Well, I´m a web designer,… by pavelasco
The reason most people would want a word processor is that MuseScore's text editing and formatting capabilities are extremely rudimentary. No word wrap, no justification, no paragraph styles, etc. But, if you can live with those limitations, then indeed, interactivity is nice.
As I said before, to have both piano and string quartet as separate examples, simply set up your score to contain all five instruments, add the notes you need, and when done, set "hide empty staves". Then the piano example will show only the piano staves, and the string example only the strings.
In reply to While this is theoretically… by Marc Sabatella
Absolutely, if writing a complete book, you should use a word processor and paste music scores (or excerpts from music scores) in it. For instance, this (quite big) free book
https://sites.google.com/view/musicalharmonysite
was made in a word processor. After that, it was published on Internet (by manually copy pasting text and uploading figures from the word processor file to the web site editor).
It was quite an adventure!
+1 What Marc Sabatella said.
It depends how many pages and what content and featues you want.
The mentioned examples done in Musescore are great but only a few pages.
For inserting tables you could try to fake them with cascaded textframes perhaps or insert them as image.
(If you would find a way to get tables into a file-format like SVG you would have an image that isn't just a raster picture but is a nice vector graphic and even could consist of true fonts that would make the table text also selectable in an exported PDF.)
You also could try to make the most of your stuff in Musescore, export as PDF and mix these PDFs with a LibreOffice document.
If you are VERY experienced with LibreOffice you can have a look at
https://struckkai.blogspot.com/2015/04/libreofficesongbookarchitect.html
At the blog there are also 2 PDFs made with this. Free Sagreras Guitar lessons (118pages)
and my free Guitar Works (200pages). These examples don't have much content made in LibreOffice (only TOC, pagenumbers, Headers, Extra-Indices) but are just a lot of "merged" PDF scores.
In reply to +1 What Marc Sabatella said… by musikai
@honkskillet, just one idea.
In reply to @honkskillet, just one idea. by Shoichi
@Shoichi
Ah, you merged some PDFs of LibreOffice and Musescore using PdfSam which is very good. (based on Sejda SDK)
For LOSA I use pdftk which has to be installed separately. LOSA is a Libreoffice document that can directly merge-in PDF files. For the fun of it I imported your example PDF into LOSA and added some stuff.
An advantage is that you don't have to do the merging manually and you can overlay LO-content over the PDF pages. Not to speak of TOC, working PDF-Bookmarks, links etc.
I don't make any money with it but every tester is welcome :-)