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Bearcublandon
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  		   Posted 12/11/2016 12:40 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Hi,

I'm trying to find a scanner that will scan PDF files into Finale. I do know that you can scan hard copies into Finale from a scanner but I don't know if it is possible to scan a soft copy file into a scanner into Finale. Am I just dreaming or are their scanners out there that will do that?

Michael
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Peter Thomsen
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  		   Posted 12/11/2016 1:17 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
If the PDF file was created directly from a music notation program (via “printing” to PDF), then you will get better results with a program like PDFtoMusic Pro.

Quoting Michael Good:

“With PDF files printed from notation programs PDFtoMusic Pro will work better than SmartScore X Pro and other optical scanning programs.
This is because PDFtoMusic Pro knows things that an OCR program can't know.
For instance, PDFtoMusic Pro knows
- that staff lines really are drawn as lines,
- that a notehead is a musical font character, rather than trying to determine a notehead from a bunch of dark pixels on a page.
This is much more accurate than optical scanning for PDFs created by a notation program.
SmartScore and other optical scanners have to figure out where staff lines and noteheads are from the dots on a page, which is more error-prone.

The flip side is that PDFtoMusic Pro cannot handle optical scans from a scanner at all.
For those you need an OCR program like SmartScore, SharpEye, or capella-scan.”

Peter

Mac Finale, 2012c, 2014d & 2014.5, Dolet 6.6 plug-in, Mac OS X 10.11.6, iMac Intel Core i7, 2.93 GHz, 16 GB RAM

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CraigP
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  		   Posted 12/11/2016 2:48 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
Peter Thomsen said...
If the PDF file was created directly from a music notation program (via “printing” to PDF), then you will get better results with a program like PDFtoMusic Pro.


I have recently purchased this program and used it on several projects. I find it very useful, but disappointing in some important respects. While it does a surprisingly good job of recognizing notes and interpreting them correctly, It has loads of rough edges. And it appears there has been no further development of the product for over a year. I would have hoped it would be worthwhile for the author to keep improving it.

My biggest complaints are:
  • You will probably end up with all sorts of garbage in the Finale project (expressions and text items that have to be deleted)
  • When you import the XML file into Finale, it seems to create a bunch of really bad parameters in the Finale document options. For example, note spacing is set to shove the last note in the measure right up against the right barline. There were numerous other problems, but I can't recall them all.


Even considering these problems, the product is probably worth using. On a big project, I'd be inclined to set up a clean score and copy the notes and hairpins from the file imported from XML, but nothing else.
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Jocko_23
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  		   Posted 12/11/2016 3:24 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
There is a program called "Capella Scan", it does just what you want! It has a phantastic recognition rate - as long as you have fonts like maestro or so in your pdf. When using Jazz Font, Broadway and the like it gets worse, and if you have scores really written by hand you better forget it (that is the reason why I never bought it).

Internally the pdf is converted into a jpg or tif, and then the recognition process starts. You need to have Ghostscript installed if I remeber it correctly.

Here is some info and the link for the trial version:
http://www.capella-software.com/us/index.cfm/products/capella-scan/info-capella-scan/
http://www.capella-software.com/us/index.cfm/download/download-capella-scan/

Jock

Finale 2011b - Win7 64bit home
Finale 25 - Mac OS X

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Mike Rosen
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  		   Posted 12/11/2016 3:41 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
First thing to remember: scanning is no longer possible in Finale 25. You will need an older version.
Second thing to remember: the scanning package that comes with Finale 2014.5 and earlier is the Lite version of SmartScore. It's pretty poor. You have to do all of the editing within Finale, and some errors are difficult to deal with.
Third thing to remember: you can only scan clear, printed copies.

That being said, in the right circumstances, scanning can save you many, many hours of inputting notes. Those of us who use it regularly have all found that a full-featured program - SmartScore or any other one - will be a lot easier to use, once you've learned how to use them.

Any scanner will work. If it isn't recognized by Finale, use the program that came with the scanner to scan as a .tiff file, and import that into Finale.


Mike Rosen
www.specialmillwork.com

Bass with Choir of the Sound www.choirofthesound.org
Volunteer copyist (The Gang of Twelve) for the Barbershop Harmony Society
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Finale 2014.5 on El Capitan
Simple Entry, QWERTY keyboard, numberpad. That's my system, and I'm stickin' to it.

"As a musician, he's a damn fine woodworker."

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Derrek
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  		   Posted 12/11/2016 6:38 PM (GMT -6)    Quote This PostAlert An Admin About This Post.
And whether scanning or (apparently) using PDFtoMusic, you are well advised to take the resulting file, once opened in Finale, copy it, and paste it into a document you have set up with the same instrumentation. That way you are less likely to have problems with margins, expression and articulation libraries, and (presumably) notes jammed right up against the final barline.

Finale 2014.5, Finale 25.1 - Windows 7 (64-bit)
GPO 5, JABB 3, World Instruments
TG Tools Full, (Sonar Platinum, Dorico)

“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” — Groucho Marx

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