Page Numbers for a songbook - Start anywhere but not at "1"

[b13]

I am writing a songbook.

In Notion i can activate the printing of page-numbers. But every score starts at "1".

For my songbook only the first song starts at "1". The following tunes have to get another index numbers, which they start from.

Now your hotline wrote to me, i should take a "dedicated"- or "copyright"-feature or something else i don´t use and write into the needed page-numbers each time, the score has NOT to start at "1". Shure, that is possible, but it takes a lot of work and the numberings sometimes do not fit together, maybe. It only looks good, if everything fits.

However, it is a compromise.

There could be a simple box, where - if the writer want´s to - the FIRST Page-Number can be entered, if it is NOT "1". If the box stays empty, the first page would be "1", else the number which is entered.

Think about it.

[b13]

Wwwwwush!

So here i am again. Is this idea not interesting for anybody else?

Does nobody write extensive works as books with notion? How do you write (or let write) the page-numbers, if it has to start at another position than "1"?

I mean, if i print the ready music as a pdf, it would be nice to have the right pagenumber already on the concerning score, wouldn´t it?

[Brian2]

Can you give an example of what you're looking for?
I'm not sure I follow the issue.

[b13]

Certainly. I discribed: I am writing a Songbook with page-numbers. But only song 1 has to start with page "1". The other songs has to start with another page-number.

Read the first post of this thread. Maybe it explains the situation.

[Surfwhammy]

You might be able to edit the page numbers in the PDF file for each score with Adobe Acrobat XI, where if this is possible you should be able to combine a set of PDF files (one for each song) into a single PDF "book" type of document . . .

I have not done this, and at present I do not have Adobe Acrobat, but intuition strongly suggests that it is possible . . .

You can try Adobe Acrobat XI for 30 days if you create an Adobe account and provide some information, which you can do with a pretend name if you have an email account setup for this purpose, which is the way I do it, since I prefer that any information I provide be attributed to one of my alternate personalities, which typically is Jules the Pantomime Horse™ or Director of the Pretend FBI (Melvin Piffle [not his real name])™, although I usually reserve the latter for informing the Directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) when I suspect that I have been probed anally by the Aliens from Outer Space, who we know are circling the planet at this very moment in low-Earth orbit as they search frantically for the missing Mirror Matter Popcorn™ that they "lost" in the late-1940s while on what they imagined would be a happy picnic in the desert outside Roswell, New Mexico, where for reference Mirror Matter Popcorn is used to power the Hilbert Space Hopper Drive™ that provides faster than light (FTL) propulsion for their spaceship . . .

Adobe Acrobat

Adobe has some nice software, and I use Dreamweaver and Photoshop, but I use other software for typesetting books . . .

Lots of FUN!

P. S. I am downloading Adobe Acrobat XI via the 30-day trial, and I will post results of a few experiments in a while . . .

[Surfwhammy]

I downloaded the free 30-day Adobe Acrobat XI evaluation--which is full-featured and includes everything--and after composing two of the songs for my upcoming book "Alien Music" written using the nom de plume "Jules the Pantomime Wonderhorse™", I used Adobe Acrobat XI to combine the individually numbered NOTION 4 scores in PDF format for two of the songs ("Alien Designs" and "Alien Mist"), which was very easy to do . . .

Basically, after you combine the individual PDF scores into a single PDF using Adobe Acrobat XI, you select the "Edit Text" option and then scroll to where you told NOTION 4 to put the page numbers in each score, at which time you can edit them by double-clicking on each page number field and then typing whatever page number you desire . . .

These are the individual numbered files created in PDF format from NOTION 4 (64-bit), and they are followed by the single combined PDF file, which shows the edited page numbers. The audio files follow, and they are in WAVE format. Each score is a few measures more than one page, so these at present are short songs, but there are more than enough notes to expand the songs into symphonies that could run for hours, if not days, which is fabulous . . .

"Alien Designs" -- PDF

"Alien Mist" -- PDF

"Alien Music" -- An Other Worldly Piano Book by Jules the Pantomime Wonderhorse -- PDF

[NOTE: To compose "Alien Designs", I went into a trance, which is possible due to the communication chip the Aliens from Outer Space implanted in my mind, so it is transcribed as it was beamed to me . . . ]

"Alien Designs" (Jules the Pantomime Wonderhorse) -- WAV (10.9MB)

[NOTE: To compose "Alien Mist", I also went into a trance but then switched to interactive mode to revisit "Alien Designs", where for reference interactive mode is an upgrade to the standard communication chip typically implanted by the Aliens from Outer Space, so it features a bit of thoughtful editing and enhancing . . . ]

"Alien Mist" (Jules the Pantomime Wonderhorse) -- WAV (12.5MB)

Fabulous!

P. S. At present, it appears that Adobe is quite enthused by cloud computing, so best wishes on making sense of their product line. Nevertheless, as best as I can determine, Adobe Acrobat XI Standard will be sufficient to edit the page numbers and to do some other useful PDF typesetting . . .

I stopped upgrading my Adobe software at Creative Suite 3, since keeping fully upgraded tends to cost at least $1,500 (US) each year, and I do not need all that stuff, really . . .

Really!

And for reference, you do not need to add page numbers to the NOTION 4 scores, which probably makes it a lot easier, since you might be able to use a word processing application that lets you import PDF files, at which time you can insert page numbers in the word processing document . . .

Another thing to check is BookBaby, which is a service that publishes eBooks and gets them into a virtual festival of digital bookstores. Their prices for conversion to the various eBook formats is very reasonable, and they have suggestions for various typesetting tools . . .

[NOTE: BookBaby is part of the "Baby" family (BookBaby, CD Baby, Film Baby, and HostBaby), and they are very good and quite reasonable in their pricing for the various services they provide. They have digital distribution agreements with a virtual festival of digital providers, and due to the vast number of artists they represent they are able to get stuff into all the major digital distributors. And you can trust them to do the accounting and royalty paying honestly and reliably. They keep a small percentage for the work they do, which is fair and reasonable, and in a practical way this lets you avoid messing with invoicing, billing, shipping, handling, and all that fulfillment stuff, which is where the honest and trustworthy aspect becomes important. And at present, BookBaby only charges a setup fee, which is reasonable, and they do not keep any of the royalties, so you get 100 percent of what the various digital distribution outlets pay, where the key to keeping the setup fee low is to submit only perfectly typeset material, because they check the typesetting, and if there are problems, then you need to correct the problems and resubmit, or alternatively they will correct the problems for a fee. Hence, it makes sense to understand the rules for typesetting eBooks in the various formats . . . ]

BookBaby

In the grand scheme of everything, what you want to do is typesetting, and it makes a bit of sense to devote a bit of time to making sense of typesetting, as well as the eBook publishing market, which can be a worthwhile opportunity, since (a) there are several different types of eBook reading devices and (b) people get bored and tend to be ready, willing, and able to spend anything less than approximately $25 (US) if it entertains them for a while . . .

Lots of FUN!

[b13]

@ Surfwhammy: Thanks a lot for a lot of information. (I´m hoping, trance is over.)

Fabulous!

[b13]

Really, i think, there are good ideas within. Thank you.

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fabulous!




thirteen "b"s

[Surfwhammy]

Really, i think, there are good ideas within. Thank you.

Glad to help!

Another possibility is to get the competitive crossgrade to Sibelius 7, since (a) it has elaborate music notation typesetting capabilities and (b) it costs less than Adobe Acrobat XI Standard . . .

[NOTE: In the US, Musician's Friend sells the Sibelius 7 Competitive Crossgrade, and they nearly always have a discount promotion, which is the way I got it, and this usually maps to the price being approximately $150 (US), as contrasted to the MSRP of$199 (US). And NOTION 3 or NOTION 4 qualifies as the competing product, where you just need the serial number for your version of NOTION. You can continue to use NOTION, since all the AVID folks care about is that you are the legal owner of the competing product, which is what the NOTION serial number proves, and it is all done online without needing to send anything like the first page of the user manual or whatever. And this is the way I got Finale, which I also do not use. My thinking at the time was that I kept reading about Finale and Sibelius, so I thought it made a bit of sense to get them just to have a better understanding of a few posts to this FORUM, although as I recall one of them (Finale, I think) will generate multipart harmony, which might be interesting, since at least in theory I can import and export via MusicXML, which might be an easy way to generate harmony parts automagically. However, neither of them do what NOTION does, which overall makes it a great way to spend $300 (US) for nothing, but I was young and had no sense . . . ]

The drawback is that Sibelius 7 might be useful only for the music notation stuff, while in contrast you can use Adobe Acrobat Standard to make an eBook . . .

I did a quick experiment with Sibelius 7.1.3, which is the current free upgrade to the competitive crossgrade that I got last year, and this is the PDF file I was able to create, where it is important to understand that I have used Sibelius 7 for about 15 minutes, hence am a bit surprised that I was able to do this . . .

[NOTE: The page numbers are correct, but I did not reset the measure numbers, so the measure numbers for the second song ("Alien Mist") are a continuation of the measure numbers for the first song ("Alien Designs"). There is an option not to show measure numbers, which is one way to solve this problem, but there probably is a way to reset the measure numbers, perhaps by doing some type of break or whatever . . . ]

"Alien Music Book" (Jules the Pantomime Wonderhorse™) -- Sibelius 7 Print Version -- PDF

This is the way I did it:

(1) I exported both NOTION 4 (64-bit) scores as MusicXML files, where one was "Alien Designs.xml" and the other was "Alien Mist.xml" . . .

(2) I started Sibelius 7 and did a "Open . . . " from the File menu, followed by browsing to the respective MusicXML file, which creates a separate score based on the MusicXML in the file. And I did this for both files, which created two separate scores in total . . .

(3) Then I added some blank measures to the first score at the end; inserted a page break to cause the blank measures to start on a new page; and then I switched to the second score; did a select all; copied everything to the clipboard; switched back to the first file; and then pasted the second score into the blank measures starting on a new page (via the page break) . . .

The only problem was the the title of the score was the name of the first song, but I changed it to "Alien Music" and then added subtitles for each song, which worked nicely . . .

Regarding page numbering, Sibelius 7 is very adamant about the first page not having a page number, as well as the page numbers being on the outside at the top, where the convention is that right-facing pages have odd numbers while left-facing pages have even numbers, hence as it is formatted, the first page will be on the right if you open a book, and pages 2 and 3 are the next left-facing and right-facing pair of pages, which makes a bit of sense if you think about it for a while. The Sibelius 7 reference material states that this is the standard way of formatting music for print, which is fine with me, and if one is working with sheet music, it makes a bit of sense not to need to look at the bottom of a page to find the page number . . .

THOUGHTS

If I can do this without knowing much of anything about Sibelius 7, then based on the general view that Sibelius 7 has deep and rich functionality with respect to formatting music notation specifically for printing as sheet music, it is entirely possible that with a bit more knowledge of the way Sibelius 7 works, there probably are more options with respect to formatting and printing . . .

If your book is going to be only music notation for a set of songs, then Sibelius 7 might work nicely, and the competitive crossgrade costs approximately $150 (US) less than Adobe Acrobat XI Standard . . .

On the other hand, if your book is going to have text, then there are other ways to do typesetting, and it also depends on the operating system platform (Mac vs. Windows) and the various applications you have installed on your computer for doing wordprocessing activities . . .

I do everything on the Mac, and I have Pages, but Pages does not import PDF files, so it is a bit useless for typesetting music books that have music notation . . .

Microsoft Word is available for the Mac and for Windows, and it probably has the ability to import PDF files, although importing PDF files might be an advanced feature or might require a third-part add-on tool. I stopped using Microsoft software over a decade ago, so all I can do is guess, but Pages (Apple) is not the swiftest application for advanced wordprocessing, and while I do not use Microsoft software on the Mac, I do a bit of typesetting using more recent versions of Microsoft Word for clients on Windows machines that they provide, hence my guess that there should be a practical way to import a PDF file to a Microsoft Word document, presuming of course that you have Microsoft Word . . .

SUMMARY

This makes two ways to solve the problem, and there should be other ways, where one might presume that the overall goal is to be able to control the page numbers and to format a nice book, which certainly should be something that can be done in a practical way that does not cost too much, which is fabulous . . .

Fabulous!

P. S. I am not in a trance at the moment, but due (a) to Big Red, Inc. now making Big Red® with pure cane sugar in glass bottles, which I order by the case, and (b) to getting a copy of Addictive Drums Metal + Diabolic Bundle and the Metal Songs MIDI Pak at a 50 percent discount, which is vastly significant because it has a virtual festival of Melodic Death Metal drumkit parts played by Daniel Erlandsson (Arch Enemy), who is my favorite drummer, I could go into a trance at virtually anytime, really . . .



Metal + Diabolic Bundle (XLN Audio)

Diabolic MIDI Pak featuring Daniel Erlandsson (XLN Audio)

"Ravenous" (Arch Enemy) -- YouTube music video

Really!

[elerouxx]

Yes, that helps!

I am now facing the mayhem of exporting parts and full score for an orchestra work. The piece has 3 movements and I don't want the page number to start over at every movement.

I thought about joining the score together in a single Notion file but then, I can't reset measure numbers! a movement should not start at measure number 40 for instance. So that didn't work either.

I ended up printing to pdf without page numbering, then joining the PDF files together and numbering the pages in Adobe Acrobat, for score AND parts!

Took me all night.