Music Printing

This is the method I use for printing sheet music into stapleable booklets. The typical limit is 80–90 inner pages, which is 20 sheets of tabloid-size paper.

Title Pages

Template. Adjust the composer name as desired; format should be “Initials Familyname” regardless of the native ordering. The following composers are specified only as their surname:

  • Johann Sebastian Bach
  • Joseph Haydn

Generate the QR code from the IMSLP reverse lookup URL for the specific inner page PDF you used; width and height should be 1.5in.

Inner Pages

The page after the cover should be blank. Use pdfjam to get the pages in tabloid format:

pdfjam --trim 'left bottom right top' --papersize '{17in,11in}' --booklet true --outfile <outfile> <infile> <pagespec>

Use {} to add blank pages in <pagespec>.

Note: if your file has annotations (e.g. figures written on an iPad) you will need to run it through Ghostscript BEFORE pdfjam; use the same command as below. This has the effect of “burning in” the annotations so they become part of the page content, not separate annotations (which printers often discard anyways).

Finalizing

Run all files through Ghostscript to remove any trash that might screw up the printer:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPreserveAnnots=false -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sOutputFile=<outfile> <infile>

Troubleshooting

  1. Yell at the printer.
  2. Double-check paper size setting.
  3. Double-check long-edge/short-edge.
  4. If the inner output is bad and the printer has toner the notes are probably grayscale, not black-and-white. Threshold and try again.