Re: 4 hands piano pieces book

[Hwaen Ch'uqi]

Greetings Urs,

You had asked for a reminder concerning the piano four-hand solution
and wrapping it into the page-layout library. Also, I would like to
reiterate my correction regarding the use of pdftk for arranging the
pages. The option to use is "shuffle," not "collate." From the manual,
the following template applies:

pdftk A=even.pdf B=odd.pdf shuffle A B output collated.pdf

For my own purposes, I recast it as follows:

                    pdftk A=Secondo.pdf B=Primo.pdf shuffle A B output
                PerformanceScore.pdf
Hwaen Ch'uqi


On 5/9/16, Hwaen Ch'uqi <address@hidden> wrote:
> Greetings David,
>
> In fact, your process of determining pagebreaks is exactly what I do.
> I choose to write the breaks directly into my files. It's just a
> personal preference as I have never been fond of global settings or
> variables.
>
> On the subject of pdftk, I miswrote: it is the "shuffle" option which
> is used, like this:
>
>     pdftk A=even.pdf B=odd.pdf shuffle A B output collated.pdf
>
> Or, mor practically,
>
>     pdftk A=Secondo.pdf B=Primo.pdf shuffle A B output PerformanceScore.pdf
>
> VERY easy and straightforward.
>
> Hwaen Ch'uqi
>
>
> On 5/9/16, David Wright <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On Mon 09 May 2016 at 14:35:17 (-0400), Hwaen Ch'uqi wrote:
>>> I have been wwriting A LOT of four-hand music, and I agree in
>>> principle with most of what I have read in this thread. Even so, I
>>> thought to chime in with my approach.
>>
>> I bow to your experience...
>>
>>> In my experience, I have found that there can be no "master file" used
>>> for determining page breaks, due to the lovely but unpredictable way
>>> that LilyPond lays out pages. So this must still be done by trial and
>>> error. I do, however, use the Secondo file in the end as a "master"
>>> for generating a Table of Contents.
>>
>> ... but that *sounds* a bit hit-or-miss. Can you find fault with the
>> following?
>>
>> Set primo and secondo separately. Examine pairs of pages starting at
>> the beginning. If the page break occurs at the same bar, insert a
>> \pageBreak at that point in your master variable. Once you meet a
>> discrepancy, insert the \pageBreak at the earlier position. Rerun
>> LP. Re-examine from where you left off.
>>
>> (I don't know where the "master file" concept came in. However, you
>> certainly want a master *variable*, rather than inserting the page
>> breaks into the source at two different places.)
>>
>>> Finally, I also use pdftk to produce the full book, but the process
>>> outlined earlier can be extremely streamlined if you use the "collate"
>>> feature. You do not need to burst the files into separate pages; pdftk
>>> will automatically alternate the pages when combining the two files.
>>
>> Sorry not to suggest the collate option; I forget it exists because I
>> never use it, the reason being that I typically don't build files
>> from mere pairs of L and R pages, but from scanned pages which have
>> needed masking at the margins. I put different masked/offset copies
>> into different directories, then move the best version of each page
>> into the assembly-directory. Everything's quick and easy to that
>> point, but the final collation has to be done manually. I find
>> moving pages in Midnight Commander less error-prone even than using
>> page-ranges in pdftk.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> David.
>>
>