Choral Public Domain Library

I have been having problems with pieces published here but only in PDF format. (BTW: my thanks to many persons
who have put pieces on this site). I have been trying to get usable copies of Charpentier's Te Deum.

1. Several PDFs look good on screen, but awful when printed, due to blurring and wrong fonts. Music which was
black-and-white on screen becomes fuzzy grey and white when printed. The substituted fonts are ugly and badly
spaced. I suspect that they are being printed at the char. spacing that was correct for the original fonts.

2. So I tried to scan the PDFs. Audiveris: "Unable to load any image from /home/manager/char/0003.pdf"
I converted the PDF to a TIFF: Audiveris reads the file, it starts to process TEXTS, crashes. In both cases the
log file is completely un-informative. I posted on the Audiveris forum, no reply yet, but activity on this forum is
low.

3. pdftomusic, trial version only. I dont want to buy the full version when the trial version fails. This saved a midi
file. The original was in 4 part chorus, the midi had only 3 staves, and only 1 line of lyrics.

Please any advice?

Charpentier's Te Deum is divided into several files. Can I pick any of them and try to reproduce the problem?

Without having tried anything yet, I would suggest to install CutePDF. Open the score and, if it looks good in your pdf viewer, virtually print it using CutePDF, so that a new pdf file is created. This trick sometimes fixes problems in the original pdf file, as problems may not propagate to the newly generated file.

A wonderful tool to handle pdf files is also PDFill FREE PDF Tools. With this tool, for example, you can transform the pdf file into a set of images (e.g., png, tiff, ...), and then assemble the images again into a new pdf file. The new pdf file is a "raster" pdf, not a "vector" pdf, so any issues with fonts and the like disappear completely.

Max

Thank you for your reply.

I would suggest Part 3: "te aeternem patrem". I did a keyword search for "charpentier te deum" and took the first result: a list of parts, and then part 3. Several other PDFs in the same list gave similar results. I got Audiveris by going to their website: audiveris.kenai.com and click the "launch" button. I converted the Pdf into a tiff using gimp. On screen, no visible difference.

I hope to try Cute pdf in a few days. I assume that a raster PDF is essentially the same as any other graphics file.
Mark

I tried printing part 3, and my system (computer + printer) worked fine. So, I was unable to reproduce the problem here. Nevertheless, the trick using either "file re-generation" with CutePDF or "file rasterization" with PDFill Tools may probably work in your case.

mark641 wrote:I assume that a raster PDF is essentially the same as any other graphics file.

Yes, it's a set of graphic files (typically one file per page), embedded into a pdf "envelope".

Max

mark641 wrote: I hope to try Cute pdf in a few days.
Mark

Did the CutePDF trick work for you?
If not, you could try a different pdf viewer, I'd recommend SumatraPDF, an opensource program.