Category: Publishing

One of the most popular posts on this blog is Why not to
use AOL, which explains in detail why you don’t want to use
AOL to deliver your email. The answer is that they don’t actually
care whether they deliver your email or not.

Before posting that, I did an extensive google search and
couldn’t find anything that explained the issue on that level of
detail, although there was of course an assumption in the
technically literate community that using AOL was a bad idea.

There are a lot of people in the technically literate
publishing community who assume something similar, but they seem
not to have actually managed to carry their point of view, because
lots of publishing opportunities which might otherwise be useful
(smashwords for
instance) require or encourage putting your material into Word format.

So I was glad to see a post by a good
writer entitled Why
Microsoft Word must Die. (I don’t actually like much of what
I’ve read by Charlie Stross, but he’s certainly an effective
writer, and lots of people do like what he wants to write.)

His post is a bit long, but does make a number of the right
arguments very cogently.

For instance, here’s how he explains the problems the
planned obsolescence model causes even for people who never use
Word themselves:

But as Word’s domination became established, Microsoft changed the file format repeatedly — with Word 95, Word 97, in 2000, and again in 2003 and more recently. Each new version of Word defaulted to writing a new format of file which could not be parsed by older copies of the program. If you had to exchange documents with anyone else, you could try to get them to send and receive RTF — but for the most part casual business users never really got the hang of different file formats in the “Save As …” dialog, and so if you needed to work with others you had to pay the Microsoft Danegeld on a regular basis, even if none of the new features were any use to you.

I don’t have much hope for the people who have no idea
how to use the “Save As…” dialog, but maybe the people who are
establishing publishing businesses will read this article and
think about their system.

Somebody told me about partifi
a year or two ago. It takes a PDF file with a musical score in
it, and turns the score into parts. Even if your religion doesn’t
forbid you to play Renaissance music from scores, you must have
run into a score with a page turn every 5 seconds that drove you
nuts, so this sounds like a really good idea.

At the time I heard of it, I went there and tried something and
the first thing I tried wasn’t immediately useful, so while I’ve
passed the word on to several people who were complaining about
page turns, I haven’t actually used it for anything.

But yesterday a music transcribing friend sent me a PDF of some
three part madrigals he’s been working on. He leaves out the
barlines, but puts the parts into score, so I thought about asking
him to send me the source or MIDI so that I could do parts, but
then I remembered Partifi.

I fed it three PDF’s, and the first two went very smoothly. It
guessed quite well at where on the page to split out the parts. I
told it the names of the parts and it produced three part files
for me.

The third one had to be set with the lines much closer together
in order to fit the whole piece on two pages. So partifi’s guess
about how to split the parts was much less useful, and even when I
figured out how to edit the guess, I still ended up with parts
missing words. I think I have an idea of how to fix this, but I
wanted to get the post done before fiddling with it any more.