NoteWorthy Composer & Adobe Acrobat

[Tears June]

Can I open or copy a NWC file into the Adobe Acrobat (5.0) ?

I tried to copy a NWC file on a MS Words doc, then use the Adobe Acrobat to open the Words doc but without success.

I saw many transcription solo is on the Adobe Acrobat file, how the people do this?

:cry:

[Frank D]

See if NWC has a "save as *.PDF" option.

[Tears June]

See if NWC has a "save as *.PDF" option.

Frank,

There is no PDF format. Only Standard NWC, Midi and Uncompressed NWC file can select in "Save As"

Another idea is can I save the NWC in image file like jpg ? As know imgae file can be very easy import to PDF.

:cry:

[Pete]

If NoteWorthy doesn't have a "Save to PDF" function, you can always go to File > Print and choose the Adobe PDF printer ...

[Tears June]

If NoteWorthy doesn't have a "Save to PDF" function, you can always go to File > Print and choose the Adobe PDF printer ...

Print and choose the Adobe PDF printer ...

saxpics
Thanks. You mean I just need to do printing process from the Adobe but how can I choose the Adobe PDF printer from NWC ? It seem there is no such function. Any additional program I need to add on my Adobe to do this?

:cry:

[Helen]

You mean I just need to do printing process from the Adobe but how can I choose the Adobe PDF printer from NWC ? It seem there is no such function. Any additional program I need to add on my Adobe to do this?

:cry:

To do this, you need Adobe Acrobat Writer, Adobe Acrobat Reader will not work for this.

Have your Noteworthy program open to whatever file you want to print. Click on the File tab (top left). Scroll to print and click. Under the general tab, all the printers that are installed into your machine will appear. Click on Adobe PDF, Distiller, Writer, or whatever other description your version of Adobe Writer appears there. Then double click that icon.

Adobe will write a PDF version which you can than print on whatever printer you have installed.

I have used this technique with Finale Notepad files, and it works for those with no lose of formatting.

Hope this helps.

[Paul Coats]

You need the full Adobe Acrobat program to do this, not just the free Acrobat Reader.

If you have the full Adobe, you open your Printer Setup dailog box, and select as your printer Acrobat Distiller, instead of your regular HP, Epson, etc, printer. While the Print Setup box is open, Click the Properties button, and on one of the tabs in there you set resolution to 300 dpi.

Then just print each part, and as you do, there will be a Save As box come up. You Give it a title, and save.

If you do as I do, for example, printing a SATB sax quartet, first print the soprano part, and name it (file name). Print the alto part, name it (file name) 2. Print the tenor, name it (file name) 3. Print the bari, name it (file name) 4. As each one prints to file, it will open. Close it.

Now you have four Adobe files saved to your desktop. Double click on the one named simply (file name). Drag and drop (file name) 2 onto it, and tell it to add it AFTER the last page. Do the same with (file name) 3 and (file name) 4. Close and save (file name). It will have all of the pages, one part after the other. You can discard (file name) 2-4.

Finale may be printed in a similar manner to Adobe.

This is how I made the downloadable Adobe files for Tim Price's lessons on the main page of Sax On The Web.

BTW, June, I did not think this up all by myself... have you seen the wonderful Cannonball Adderley site?

http://www.cannonball-adderley.com/

I wrote the webmaster there and asked him how he did it on his site, and he walked me through it using Finale. Then, I did the same with NWC.

[Ritchie]

You can create pdf files without buying Adobe Acrobat Destiller/Writer/whatever, just with free software. You will need the following:
1 - a printer driver for a post script printer (in colour or black and white, whatever you like your files to be)
2 - Ghostscript
3 - Ghostview

You can download Ghostscript & Ghostview e.g. here: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/. Read the licence!

Create a new post script printer in your system. Select this post script printer as the printer to print your Noteworthy sheets, select the "print to file" box, and you'll be asked for the output file name. Give it any name, with a .ps extension.

Then open the *.ps file you just created with Ghostview. Select "Convert" from the File-menu, select "pdfwrite" as output device, and select the resolution, 300 or 600 dpi (I've got the German version, so the names in your menues may be a bit different). Store the output as a .pdf file.

If you'd like to avoid some of the manual action you can redirect the post script printer do directly pass its output to Ghostscript.

You cannot create fancy pdf files with tables of contents, hyperlinks and all the other stuff that makes pdf nice and comfortable, the result is just a plain document as printed on paper, but it can be displayed with Acrobat Reader. It works with any program that prints.

[Paul Coats]

Richie: I tried the Ghostview before with poor results, very distorted pages, a few years ago, but decided to try again.

I downloaded an Adobe Universal Postscript Driver, and set it to print to File instead of LPT1.

I printed to the resulting Generic PostScript Printer. It gave an option of saving as a .prn file, but I saved it as a .ps file. The file was then on my desktop with a Ghostview icon. Double clicking on the icon opened the file in Ghostview, and the page of music looked fine.

As a test, I printed from Ghostview to my printer, and the printed sheet music looked good, too.

I then converted to the .pdf file, and the resulting file has an Adobe icon, and if double clicked, opens in Adobe Acrobat Reader. It looks great, just as it should. However, when I print it, there are noteheads, clefs, key signatures, titles, but no staff lines, no bar lines, no note stems or beams. There are rests, accents, and a few other articulation markings, but no lines.

Any suggestions?

[Paul Coats]

UPDATE!!!

My problem was not a problem after all. I was doing this with my small laptop computer and a tiny Canon BJC-80 printer. I transferred the files to my Dell desktop computer, and with my HP930C printer, the files print correctly, with staves, barlines, etc. All looks just fine.

When I tried this method I did not have a postscript driver. I did a little search and found and downloaded a suitable driver here:

http://www.adobe.com./support/downloads/product.jsp?product=44&platform=Windows

And downloaded the

Adobe Universal PostScript Windows Driver Installer 1.0.6 - English

I installed this. When you get to the point in the installation where it asks for printer port to install to, specify "File".

At the Ghostview site

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/

The files I downloaded were named GSV44W32.exe (I have Windows 98SE) for Ghostview, and GS800W32.exe for Ghostscript 8.0. The 8.0 version was not the most recent, but I downloaded that one. the later 8.1 was a Beta version. I leave testing of new software to others more experienced.

I installed each of these, and followed what Richie described above, which is basically a copy of what Fred Nachbaur has in his helpful post on the NWC site.

So, the method does work, and works well, other than my small temporary problem with a tiny printer.

One thing that you can do with the full adobe program is add pages to a file from other pdfs. So, when I pdf a sax quartet, I can put Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Baritone sax parts all in one file by drag and drop.

Is there a way to combine files like this, making one multipage file with the Ghostview method?

Another thing you could do is put the various separate pdfs into a zip file.

Richie wrote, "If you'd like to avoid some of the manual action you can redirect the post script printer do directly pass its output to Ghostscript."

How is this done?

Anyway, this is an excellent and easy way to pdf sheet music from any notation program without buying the expensive Adobe program.

[Ritchie]

Paul, I'm glad you solved your problems. I'm using one of the Windows printer drivers supplied from MS, printing the files for an HP Color LaserJet 8550-PS, and a 600 dpi resolution for the conversion to pdf.

Redirecting can be done with the "RedMon" from the Ghostview site, but I did not try it.

After all, the full Adobe still has to offer something more than this simple and cheap method, but I am quite sure you can find some shareware/freeware program to put several post script or pdf files into one. With google I found http://www.informatik.com/pdfappend.html, but they're asking $59 for the licensed version.

I was not aware of Fred Nachbaur's post, but once you discover the "convert" menu item in Ghostview you know how to create pdf files :wink:

[mahill2006]

just spend the money to get Finale. It is great

[Paul Coats]

Finale is a very powerful program, but is simply too cumbersome. These printing problems for going to pdf are common to any printing, not just NWC.

I can finish a piece, with good appearance, publishable appearance, in about 10% of the time it takes me to do the same thing in Finale. While Finale does have some special features it can handle better, these are are not needed for 99% of the music we need to put into notation.

Also, Finale's multi-tiered pricing makes it prohibitive to most users. It is really more a publisher's program than a working musician's program.

[alsdiego]

Paul,

There's another simple way to convert any document you can print into a pdf file. Get Paperport 9 (www.scansoft.com).... it's $99 bucks for the full program, or $70 bucks to upgrade from an earlier version. Very versatile program for scanning, creating "paperless files", etc. It's something of a cult favorite among us computer geeks.

With Paperport 9 installed, go to your Noteworthy program, and select the "Print" function. You will see that one of your "printers" is now Paperport. Click on that printer driver, and Voila! your noteworthy document is automatically sent to the Paperport program. Once the document is in Paperport, you can print it, save it as a pdf file, edit it, add comments, etc., etc. Really cool stuff.

Hope this helps.

Al