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Best path to small pdfs for Web/print from scanned music manuscript

Blendo Boffo
Registered: Dec 12 2011
Posts: 2

I am an old-school classical composer and have a trove of my old music manuscripts that I want to get scanned and offer on the Web, until such time as I can afford to have them professionally engraved in electronic file form (in Sibelius e.g., which will cost me thousands of dollars to have done). Hand-engraved music looks much like text plus a little line art (with the staff lines as the only purely straight horizontal parallel lines), and I gather from my researchy so far on this and other forums that the best approach is to have them
 
- scanned to TIF
- Probably either B/W or grayscale,
- 200 or 300 dpi
and then
- converted to PDF,
- possibly Optimized in Acrobat in various ways (especially background suppress, since some of the old paper is yellowed, possibly jpg compression of some sort.
 
If I can have my cake and eat it too, I'd actually like to have very small files for quick clean web display that will ALSO print crisp black and white copy with nice clean curves on the ties, slurs, note flags, and round noteheads.
 
Anybody have any advice or see any red flags in the above?
Direct answers also welcomed: davshalomov [at] earthlink [dot] net
 
Thanks

My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro 9.4, Windows
try67
Expert
Registered: Oct 30 2008
Posts: 2398
Seems fine, expect I would try to do as many optimizations as possible on the image files outside of Acrobat, preferably using a good photo editing application, like Photoshop.

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Blendo Boffo
Registered: Dec 12 2011
Posts: 2
Thanks for your post, try67.

I was atually hoping for more detail from folks who have gone down this path. The files are being scanned directly to .pdf as it turns out, and my next research indicated that TIFFs and JPGs both tend to be a little larger initially. Anyone have suggestions on compression? I have tried reducing filesizes after scanning, with PDF Optimizer in Acrobat Pro 9, but even the High quality setting discards all the grays in my grayscale image, which means jaggy edges on curves if you go to 100% display or beyond. How do I compress without losing all the virtual anti-aliasing on curves?

Thanks,

David A