[samibe]

Occasionally, I get music that doesn't have a condensed score for the accompanist (me). I could copy the music, cut the copy apart, reassemble the accompaniment into fewer pages, and scan/import that, but it seems like there should be a way of doing that digitally. 

On some pages there's only a handful of measures of music because each vocal part is on its own line. Less than 40% of the page is accompaniment. It would be nice to be able to trim out or hide the other parts and extra white space and then re-page the PDF. (So that instead of 1 or 2 lines of accompaniment on a page there can be 4, 5 or 6.)

Does anyone know of a PDF editing software that can do that? Or have a way that they do something similar? Thanks.

[BRX]

Any good professional PDF-Software should do that. My favourite is PDF X-Change Pro. I've done what you want simply with the internal screenshot feature to snapshot the part you want to a new opened file/page in the editor and paste and organized it there like I wanted it.

There's a way in MSP too, but you have to duplicate the pages where you have your parts in it and you want to cut (by changing the page order, example from 1-3 to 1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,3) and then crop only your part of the page you want to keep. You can then view that in vertical scroll and see as many cropped parts as fit on one page. You can export scores to PDF from MSP, but don't believe you get more then one cropped part per PDF.

[samibe]

I had an idea about this today.
I like BRX's suggestion about duplicating the pages and then cropping them down to just the relevant info and using the Vertical Scrolling Display Mode to show all of the cropped views close together. 
Expanding on that idea a bit, what if parenthesis could used in the page numbers field to delineate a group of pages. The group of 'pages' could be treated like a page and be used in Two-Page Display Mode.

Example, an 8-page song with two lines per page would be 1,1,2,2,3,3,4,4,5,5,6,6,7,7,8,8. Each copy of the page would be cropped down to just the relevant line (1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, etc.)
If an equivalent portrait page could have up to six lines on it, then the page number field could be changed to (1,1,2,2,3,3),(4,4,5,5,6,6),(7,7,8,8). This would result in a 3-page condensed song that would need only one or two page turns depending on whether the song is viewed in two-page/book mode or single page mode.

I'm sure actually implementing this would be very complicated but maybe this is a bit more feasable.

[itsme]

No doubt, such a procedure works. But it looks so tedious that I guess it's not so much more effort to just rewrite what you need in MuseScore and get full flexibility to create any layout you like.

[elenafj]

Occasionally, I get music that doesn't have a condensed score for the accompanist (me). I could copy the music, cut the copy apart, reassemble the accompaniment into fewer pages, and scan/import that, but it seems like there should be a way of doing that digitally. 

On some pages there's only a handful of measures of music because each vocal part is on its own line. Less than 40% of the page is accompaniment. It would be nice to be able to trim out or hide the other parts and extra white space and then re-page the PDF. (So that instead of 1 or 2 lines of accompaniment on a page there can be 4, 5 or 6.)

Does anyone know of a PDF editing software that can do that? Or have a way that they do something similar? Thanks.

I’ve run into this exact problem, and unfortunately most PDF editors alone won’t quite do what you’re describing in a clean way. Basic tools like Acrobat can crop white space, but they can’t intelligently remove staves or reflow music onto fewer pages. The most effective route is usually to get the music back into notation software. If you can import the PDF into something like MuseScore, Sibelius, or Finale using their PDF-to-score tools, you can hide the vocal staves, condense the layout, and then export a new accompanist-friendly PDF. The results aren’t perfect, but they’re often good enough with a bit of cleanup. For quick fixes, some people also screenshot just the accompaniment systems and reassemble them in a PDF editor, which is clunky but faster than scanning.

[Geoff Bacon]

Or you could just crop each page to the section you want to see (assuming only one section per page) and use vertical scrolling to compact them together.

If you have more than one section on a page e.g. page 4, then edit the song, go to the Files tab and change the page order to something like 1-3,4,4,5-20.
Then crop the each page 4 for the sections you want.

Another possibility is that you convert the file to ABC but I'm guessing that may involve more work than simply cropping.

Geoff

[BRX]

Well, there's no easy way I know. One (which works but needs a bit of editing so it depends how big the score is) way I used to crop a PDF with a PDF Editor is this:

(I'm using a licensed version of PDF-XChange Pro; there probably are similar methods in other "big" editors available in Acrobat & Co.)

I open a second tab with a new empty PDF in A4 format. In the first one is the original PDF.
Now I use the screenshot feature (camera icon) which allows to copy a selectable part of the page to the clipboard. So I select/crop the area I want in my condensed PDF, change to the other tab and paste it there.

Repeat ad nauseum (and you can also change the size and position of the pasted items as needed. If the first page is filled I create a second page and continue on that).

Maybe there are more elegant and efficient methods, but I don't know them and this works for me (if cropping in MS or my ABC files aren't enough).