I was looking back on my blog to remind myself how I did score scanning last year (when I took on the Christmas music library for the training band). It looks like the point I reached was to fire up my old MacBook to do the main PDF handling. That route would probably still work although I’ve not booted the machine up for some time and I don’t want to rely on it so I did a bit more looking round.

Co-pilot, the AI increasingly integrated with Windows, suggested using a built in method to “print” all the image files to a PDF. I tried that and remembered both that I’d tried it and found it wanting last year. It failed to let me put the files in the correct order and cut off some of the edges. What did work was to use Powerpoint and drop each image on a fresh slide set up to the size of A4 paper. That allowed me to save a PDF file that was in the right order and not too huge.

I might dig back and see if I can figure out what Ghostscript code I used to reduce the file sizes last year but there were some trade offs in quality so I might stick with what I’ve got – 6.5MB isn’t too bad for a 15 page score.