Score Compiling

• Jan 19, 2013 - 00:24

Hey everyone... I just finished the Fourth movement of this symphony I've been writing HUZZAH!

But unfortunately I saved every movement as a separate file... Anyone have any recommendations on how I should put all movements into one file for printing and/or parts? Or can you direct me to an appropriate How To section?

Thanks!

Cheers
-EC

Comments

• Jan 19, 2013 - 05:07

Congrats on the symphony! Actually, you probably did better by having the movements separate. MuseScore gets slower the larger the work is. And setting up the breaks between movements is not as straightforward as it could be (this should change for the better in the next major version).

I'm not really sure I *would* want to combine the movements - why not print them all separately? I guess if you are printing double sided or on tabloid-size paper with two pages per sheet it might be useful. There are programs out there that can combine PDF's - pdfsam is one I have used successfully.

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• Jan 22, 2013 - 19:33

Yeah, my God, a Symphony! I don't know how anyone can do that.

I am a graphic designer so I have some experise in preparing files for print and for export in PDF format. Depending on what software you have access to, combining the pages in a separate document seems like the best option. If you have access to Adobe InDesign, then here is the best option:

  1. Save the pages as image files (JPEG, PNG, TIFF, or PDF), making sure to name them in such a way that you don't get them mixed up.
    • (By the way, if you later edit a page, just save the new image, using the same name. You can then update the inDesign file and it will replace the old image with the new one.)
    • If you use pdf files instead of image files, inDesign will automatically use the first page of a multi-page pdf file, so you have to create individual files for each page.
  2. Create an inDesign file with pages of the correct dimension.
  3. Embed the page images in the inDesign pages.
  4. The great advantage is that, at this point, if you want to add text, you can use inDesign text boxes, which work a lot better than MuseScore text boxes.
  5. Save the inDesign file and then Export it as a PDF file.

There are some keyboard shortcuts in inDesign that will make all of this go quite quickly. To place an image on a page, use Alt-D, or Command-D for Macintosh. To Export the file as a PDF, use Alt-E, or Command-E for Macintosh.

You can do the same thing in QuarkXPress, which should work just as well. You can also do this in Adobe Illustrator, or even MS Word, but it is a much more laborious process.

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