scanning sheet music to pdf or tiff? (o)

[kilroy bass]

hello,

I've got some sheetmusic that I want to scan. The source of the
sheetmusic is from a magazine. I want to scan it and print it
out at a later time. Is PDF recommended? Or should I use TIFF?
Which one would have a smaller file size?

 

[Dances With Crows]

I've got some sheetmusic that I want to scan. The source of the
sheetmusic is from a magazine. I want to scan it and print it out at
a later time. Is PDF recommended? Or should I use TIFF?

I'd scan each page to a separate TIFF, since TIFFs are easy to edit if
necessary. PDFs are basically write-once; once you've gotten your data
into a PDF, it's insanely difficult to edit it in any useful way.

Which one would have a smaller file size?

Your "scan to PDF" almost certainly just wraps a set of PDF instructions
around each TIFF, so the PDF will be larger than the sum of all the
TIFFs' sizes by a few K.

You can decrease the file sizes by trying different compression methods
on your TIFFs. The smallest is G4, but that method only works on
black-and-white data. If you have to scan in grayscale and you need
lossless compression, use LZW since Unisys's damned stupid LZW patent is
no longer valid. If you don't mind lossy compression and you need
grayscale, use JPEG-TIFF if your software can handle that--many
commercial and some Free packages can't. Best bet is probably to use
ImageMagick or something to convert TIFF->JPEG directly if you decide
JPEG is OK. Don't scan in color unless you absolutely have to.

 

[Mendel Leisk]

hello,

I've got some sheetmusic that I want to scan. The source of the
sheetmusic is from a magazine. I want to scan it and print it
out at a later time. Is PDF recommended? Or should I use TIFF?
Which one would have a smaller file size?

Size will be about the same. My 2c, use tiff.

 

[Wayne Fulton]

I've got some sheetmusic that I want to scan. The source of the
sheetmusic is from a magazine. I want to scan it and print it
out at a later time. Is PDF recommended? Or should I use TIFF?
Which one would have a smaller file size?

The main thing is to scan it in line art mode (which might have other
names in some scanner software, maybe B&W Document mode). Line art is
entirely either full black or full white, no intermediate gray tones.
This is of course what sheet music is too.

If you scan sheet music in line art mode, at 300 dpi, it will be a
better scan, will print better, and will be a relatively small file.

8.5x11 inches at 300 dpi line art mode will be about 1MB, but any type
of file compression, like LZW or G3, will reduce it to about 250KB per
page. TIF or PDF wont greatly affect this size if line art.

If you scan in color mode instead, the file will be larger. JPG will be
at least 500KB per full size page, and will be much less clear.