Ideal format to engrave on an iPad Pro 12,9 inches

Dorico
1

Hi everyone,

I have to engrave a string quartet to be read on 12,9 inches iPad Pros. What is the best “paper” format you suggest and the ideal margins and staff size? It is required to have two systems per pages in landscape view.

Thanks in advance!

Francis

2

You could always make a custom layout size to match the exact dimensions of the iPad’s screen. That would be “best” rather than merely trying to force a paper to adapt.

3

Also remember that margins are not necessary when working with an iPad

4

Or rather, they can be minimized since you won’t be printing. You still need to have slight margins.

5

I would also be interested to know, what are the dimensions of the 12.9’ screen in mm?

7

The 12.9” iPad Pro display is 2732 × 2048 pixels, almost exactly 4:3 aspect ratio.

Measuring in inches and converting, I get 260 × 197 mm.

Two 4-staff systems in landscape will be rather small for string players’ reading distance.

1 Like
9

Ask papa google. He knows everything.

10

Thanks for you help, Mark!
And I’ll create small margins as Romanos suggested

11

Try this link: Apple iPad Pro - 12.9” (5th Gen) Dimensions & Drawings | Dimensions.com

12

Hi @francisb ,
just as an exercise I tried to make some layouts for a string quartet (Brahms), adapting the stave sizes to 60% for the 3 staves, apart from the one that should be read from the player in that particular layout (like in a Piano and Violin for example), is possible to have 2 Systems per page were the main staff is at 7mm, and the player can have a look at what the other are playing…
Here attached an example, maybe it can be useful to understand what I mean (ignore the Full Score but look at the parts layouts: vn1, vn2, vla, vc) (it was a fast xml import so don’t be bothered by the strange spacings etc…, and I added an empty flow 1 just to have the Romanza numbered correctly in its Flow heading :slight_smile:
example quartett layout for iPad 12.dorico (1.1 MB)

13

It seems like Dorico “thinks” of page sizes in terms of pixels at 72 PPI. For example, Letter size is defined in the scorelibrary.xml file as 612 x 792. The 12.9 iPad Pro is 264 PPI so if I scale 2048 x 2732 to 72 PPI, that should be 559 x 745.

I don’t own an iPad Pro, but here’s a zipped doricolib file that will add those dimensions as an “iPad Pro” page size in Layout Options / Page Setup / Page Size. The file also includes an “iPad (8th gen)” size too as that’s what I have. If any one wants to add the doricolib file to their DefaultLibraryAdditions folder, set up a file, then open the resultant PDF in an iPad Pro, I’d be curious to hear if it is defined correctly. The “iPad (8th gen)” size opens correctly in ForScore on my 8th gen iPad anyway.

iPadPageSize.zip (411 Bytes)

EDIT: If added correctly, the 2 iPad sizes should appear near the bottom of the dropdown as below.

dropdown
dropdown701×761 143 KB

Obviously you can edit the file to create other iPad sizes as well.

2 Likes
14

Points, you could call them. :grinning:

1 Like
15

Ah, right, duh!

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Defining the page in points is a PostScript thing (rather than a Dorico thing).

Of course I didn’t account for the space taken up by a status bar in ForScore, or whatever …

1 Like
17

ForScore can display PDFs full screen for performance, so I thought it would be useful for testing page size.

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I have been setting a 3mm margin and choose the “Concert” paper size (for the PDF) for a few years now, from the 9.7in iPad originally and through to the 12.9in which works. I sometimes play with the rastral size.

1 Like