Options to support making books

[Denkster]

Hi friends,

A customer dropped by today, leaving a pile of interesting feature requests.
Here is one: options to support making books.
We discussed this before, in fact I'm surprised it is not in the Feature Requests yet!

The Encore program should support the notion 'book'.

A book is a set of 1 or more scores.

On top of the properties of the scores, a book has some extra properties
A book has the following properties

• 1 title,
• 1 or more author names,
• 0 or 1 editor name,
• 0 or 1 copyright notice
• 0 or 1 publisher name,
• 0 or 1 publishing date,
• 0 or 1 ISBN number,
• 0 or 1 notes from the editor,
• 0 or 1 introduction,
• 0 or 1 table of contents,
• 0 or 1 index table,
• 0 or more table of references,
• 1 or more pages,
• 1 page size,
• 1 set of margin settings (1 set = 5 numbers: left, top, right, bottom, binding width),
• 0 or more footers (for all , all odd, or all even pages),
• 0 or more headers (for all , all odd, or all even pages)

Each page can contain

• 0 or more images
• 0 or more scores
• 0 or 1 page number.

The book puts limitations on the properties of the scores
All systems scores in the book are fitted within book's margin settings.
Systems which are too wide or too high should be scaled, or re-edited (automatically or after a warning, manually).

Special demands

• Original measure numbering of each score should be kept intact.
• Original titles, composer, instructions of each score should be kept intact.
• Other text elements should be a users choice: keep or drop.
• A score can start at any distance of the page's top margin, so pages can have more then one score.
• The number of systems on each page of a book can be set per page (as currently can be done in a score).
• Superfluous systems should flow to the next page automatically (same procedure as currently within a score).
• It should be possible to add and remove scores to any page of a book.
• It should be possible to add and remove images to any page of a book.
• When a score of the book is edited, the book is updated automatically.

Kind regards

Eveline

[FreeBandMusic]

I really don't have a need to make books, exactly, although I can see where others do. It would be nice, for me, if the definition of a 'book' was flexible enough to hold a hold a composition consisting of a score and its collection of extracted parts.

I know everyone who is writing for orchestra and band (concert marching, jazz) and instrumental ensembles would be able to use this.

If I remember correctly the original discussion was about enforcing a consistent size, layout and style across a number of scores. That woud be nice for me too, for many of the same reasons; all the parts of a composition should have the same style and appearance.

Thanks

John Thompson
FreeBandMusic.biz

[Denkster]

If I remember correctly the original discussion was about enforcing a consistent size, layout and style across a number of scores. That would be nice for me too, for many of the same reasons; all the parts of a composition should have the same style and appearance

I think the user defined templates brought by version 5 will address this wish

Yes,
But your wish is much more modest compared to mine.
I clearly defined 'book' in my post, in the list of properties of books, the list of page properties and the list of special demands.

Especially Note: images, measure numbering

k.r. Eveline

[anticks]

Sorry to bump this old thread but.....

I am sure I raised this subject a while ago, but can't find a reference to it in the forums, I don't know if the forums get pruged every now and again - then agian it may have been on the old yahoo forums.

Anyway i digress.

This is an excellent idea - this is something I do at the moment (with Enc4.5.2 i think)

How I do this is:
Print every page in my score to an eps file (this is subset of postscript format and is a suitable file format to import into a publishing software program, I use Word, not ideal, but its all I have) I print each page for each score I need - (I have written some software/scripts to automate this), then I import these into my word document (again I have a macro in a special word template to do this).

Obviously within the Word document I can freely add other text, images etc.

This gets the job down, but is not ideal. Firstly the eps page gets re-sized downwards from the intended encore size (depending on how the page size was defined in encore), secondly, i I need to adjust/edit/correct etc anything on the score I have to repeat the whole process, finally you need a decent postscript comaptible printer - or else you rely on MSWord rendering the omported postscript and it is rubbish...

A seamless way to do this in encore would be superb!

To add to the original list of requireemnts as to what defines a "book" I would suggest that the scores that are added to the book are links to individual encore files, then anyone encore file could be used in many books - often I produce custom compilations from a tandard list of pieces.

Hope this makes sense.

Nick

[polarbreeze]

The problem with creating a book within Encore rather than in a separate publishing program is that the book will only be as good as Encore's native book-making capabilities. The list of features that would then need to be added to Encore to make a half-decent book would be rather daunting - for example, currently it doesn't even have a way to include graphic objects. So personally I would favour leaving the book-making to a program designed for the task, and adding capabilities to Encore that would enable such programs to import "Encore score objects" (similar to embedding an Excel spreadsheet in a Word document for example). I think that would be the best of both worlds.

[Nor]

Dear Eveline,

Your ideas are really great! I think Sibelius offers such features you mentioned. I'm currently writing my 2nd jazz book for AdavnceMusic,com but I can only make PDF files from Encore while I layout my book in MS WORD, all these struggling in order to submit a complete manuscript for revision.

I'd love to use Sibelius -even I'm already a registered customer of Sibelius.com- but you see, I'm used to make all my notation on the fly using just Encore.

I'm pretty sure q would suggest using Adobe Illustrator for making WONDERFUL MUSIC BOOKS but we are not at your level q , I'd love to learn lot of stuff from you say how you laid out pages etc.....

I'm with Eveline's ideas