Creating a correct XML from a pdf file by analyzing the pdf is a difficult task for any program. Normally a lot of touch-up has to be done afterwards. I'm not familiar with all programs that can do this conversion since it is a hughes task to compare them all. The main issue is that I wanted a program that converts scores and chords as well, and do it without any mistakes of course. I did some work with Fotoscore and MuseScore but I was very quickly convinced they both make such a mess of it and needed so much touch-up afterwards that PDFtoMusic was really heaven compared to that, not to say 10 times better. The only thing is that their chords detection was not complete nor correct but they did listen to me and implemented suggested improvements in the beta version. The goal is to do no touch-up at all because otherwise you soon come to a point that the touch-up work becomes as much work as notating the scores yourself from the beginning. So it is better to use an already very good program, learn what goes wrong and discover why it goes wrong and then try to convince the makers to implement suggested improvements.

So yes you discovered a glitch in Family Joy (I will look into it specificly) and no I don't intend to look to any other program and certainly not if separated tasks are needed for scores and chords. The PDFtoMusic people are willing to implement improvements and the beta version does already a good job. I did specificly test it as batch jobs on a whole list (384) of BIAB files to be able to discover all problems involved. My goal is to end up with nothing else then one reliable conversion from BIAB pdf file into a perfect Avid Scorch copy.
As it is now (with my .bat correction file), I'm so close that I already convert every file I use for Avid Scorch since it is hardly extra work but only a few more clicks on my PC and I'm ready.

Matt I'm looking forward to more comments from you and more people who may start to use it. May be some more explanation is needed around the use of the .bat file. Any help is welcome.

P.S.
I did look into A Family Joy and remembered I was surprised about the complexity of how the song has been written (I am just an amateure musician). The short and bad translation of ties from BIAB mgu to pdf causes ties to be detected as triangles. I did delete those in the .bat file. I also did mess around in the Sibelius result to add ties, but didn't succeed. That's the reason of the odd bar 9. Still not a bad result I think for this file.

(What I really like to know is how can you set a different number of bars for different systems in BIAB as shown in this file?? I like to do that all the time but never succeeded! )

Last edited by robvh; 02/10/14 04:46 AM.
Musicians and music publishers are still wasting too much paper...come on men we live in the digitised age...Wake up!