Dear users and developers,
I made a score in A3 size, but I should export a PDF in B4 size.
How could I do it while maintaining the layout but not cropping the score?
I could not find any activated options to rescale, adjusting to the resized paper size.
Best regards,
If you don’t want to do any layout work again at all, it’s probably easiest to export at the existing size and then use a tool such as PDF-BatchScale (PDF-BatchScale - Notation Central) to quickly resize it.
Hi.
I don’t understand the problem. A3 and B4 have the same H/W ratio (sqr2), and the pdf output is a vector drawing, not bitmap… Use your A3 pdf as a source for B4, it should be rescaled without any cropping. Or am I missing something here?
That’s a fair point. If a B4 PDF is an absolute necessity (rather than just an instruction for whoever’s printing to downscale from A3 to B4), changing the page size, page margins and space size should do most of the job. In order to get an exact proportional downscale in Dorico you’d also need to reduce any Absolute Font Styles and Paragraph Styles appropriately and potentially tweak frames on Page Templates.
@MarcLarcher
I should submit a score according to a guide of a call for scores. When printing PDFs with an actual printer, I can easily find the rescaling option to the selected paper size. However, I have no existing printer which supports B4 size, and it does not readily convert the paper size with rescaling.
@pianoleo
Thank you for pointing out the utility!
You have to submit a paper score? How unusual in this day and age. Really?
You could try online tools, such as:
Also, ghostscript has dozens of options amongst which you can resize PDFs.
No, I should submit PDF in B4 size.
Thank you for letting me know about these software programs.
Wow, Ghostscript is still alive!
Not only is Ghostscript still alive, it thrives. As a matter of interest (just quietly!) GS is used in Lilypond to produce its fine output.
I recall a composition competition a while back where my composer colleague had to submit B4 size PDF. (Maybe this is the same people). It’s patently absurd because PDF is scalable vector graphics not bitmap and you can scale to any size, as @MarcLarcher pointed out B4 is B series and is commensurate with A Series in that it also uses 1:√2 proportionality, so there are no issues with scaling.
The B series paper sizes were created in order to provide paper sizes that weren’t covered by the A series, but also use an aspect ratio of 1:root2. B sizes are defined as size B(n) being the geometric mean of size A(n) and size A(n-1). The Geometric Means of 2 numbers being the square root of the product of the two numbers.
So I don’t know what they are going on about.
Thats true, it’s easily resizable.
I found B-Sizes to be much better suited for music than A sizes, which are either too small to have a satisfying amount of music on them for parts or too big to handle easily.
I guess they want B-sizes, so they can print it to the jury with a printer which just – prints.
Having a lot of scores and a lot of jurors, this surely eases up the process.
I do not know of any printer that ‘just’ prints, let alone one that just prints B4.