Re: Re: Re: Re: Scanner and software recommendations


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Posted by Jim Andrada on September 15, 2003 at 20:03:17:

In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Scanner and software recommendations posted by C(G) on September 15, 2003 at 17:05:10:

Yes, the editing certainly is "cumbersome" - good choice of words.

First you have to spend the time to FIND the errors, then you have to fix them using fairly unsatisfactory editing tools, then you have to live with the mess caused by the errors you didn't find that seem to always get Sibelius terminally confused.

Then you probably wind up starting over and entering the part by hand. Which if you'd started out doing that would have been finished long ago.

I rarely fight it any more - if it's a single part I just key it in. If it's the piano part, well I usually tell my wife it's time to remember all they taught her about "transposition on the fly" at conservatory.

I don't get away with it, but it's at least worth a try.

By the way, I do have Ghostscript and there are indeed ways to get the PDF into a usable form (even if you have to print it out and re-scan it!) It would just be nice if PDF were directly supported as an input option.

I wonder if it's a case of "There's less here than meets the eye" or "These products fill a much needed gap" in our toolkit.

But it all SOUNDS like such a great idea, and looks so great at trade shows! I'm convinced those guys have some special master pages that they know will work and they keep them under lock and key in climate controlled rooms when they aren't actually using them on the show floor - probably with as much attention to security as the original copy of the Declaration of Independence. Not that I ever did anything so "creative" when I was doing the computer show circuit.

So if I'm so negative, why do I persist? Basically because I've been interested in computer processing of Non Coded Information (NCI) lo these many years as well as trying to train computers to do things that are "easy" for people. In the late fifties I was somewhat involved in the (mostly failed) attempts to get computers to translate Russian to English which led me to trying to use semi-natural language to program computers which led to designing and developing compilers for Fortran, PL/1, etc. It was all great fun!

And I played tuba too!


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