iPad pdf flail

[ysobel]

So, okay.

The choir that I am in is performing a piece of music that is not only in public domain, but is available as a PDF file. The department provided us with nicely printed out copies using said PDF; there is enough music that even just as papers stapled together, it is rather unwieldy. (For me. Then again, any sort of book type thing is unwieldy for me.

But aha, I think, I have an iPad; iPads can display PDF files; I do not find the iPad unwieldy; PROBLEM SOLVED.

(you'd think)

There are two problems.

One: bits of the pdf show up as blank white on the iPad. Partial pages. It is complete on the printout version; it displays on my PC, except that there is half a second of lag before the offending bit displays; it does not display right on the iPad.

Two: There is significant lag when I 'turn' pages. When I have counted seconds, it has been anywhere up to ten. This is a problem when I need to see what my next note is.

I tried splitting the original pdf up into sections (each movement has a top-level bookmark) to see if the problem, at least the second one, was file size. It didn't help at all. I suspect now the problem is that it is highly image-based, or something, rather than text-based.

On advice from someone on rav I tried switching it to the original pdf engine, and also turning "higher quality images" off. Still problematic. I tried toggling the option to pre-cache adjacent pages. Still problematic.

...does anyone have ANY idea how I can get this to work? I will love you forever.

Comments

[existence]

The only other option I can think of is spliting it into image files in their own directory, sorry. :/ Likely it is an images or special characters acting weird on ipads thingy.

[azurelunatic]

I was also thinking images.

[sophie]

This was my thought, too.

[ysobel]

...any suggestions as to how?

[sophie]

http://pdftoimages.com/ looks like a really easy way to do it, although it doesn't look like the images it makes are very big, so it might not be the best. I'll take a look for more, though.

[ysobel]

...any suggestions as to how?

[existence]

Someone goes through and screenshots the page at a dimension easily viewable by ipads and then the images are saved in a folder? I don't own an iPad so I am unsure as to what dimension each page needs to be, but I am sure the information on an ipad resolution is out there. I suppose this is also assuming that the ipad has the same camera roll or preview function that iPhone does.

[jesse_the_k]

Also, there are a variety of PDF viewers for iOS; I've had the best luck with GoodReader. (When it's scaling the PDF image, it at least has a progress indicator so you know what's going on. Better yet, it seems to cache the scaled images, so that once you've gone through the whole piece, it may give you decent access time on subsquent review.

At the App Store and *free* and it also includes some nifty file management tools.

[ysobel]

I meant to say that as part of the original post -- but yeah, I am using GoodReader. :/

[azurelunatic]

If you had music writing software, I'd wonder if you could transcribe it through that and make a clean copy.

[ysobel]

...I do have music writing software, but ... eight movements of a mass, by hand? Yerk. Even if I just do the soprano part (which then doesn't give me other parts to use for reference), that's a lot of transcription.

Might be worth it though... dunno

[azurelunatic]

Does it accept scanned "handwritten" music to transcribe? I think Dad's did.

[ysobel]

no :/

[elf]

Here from network.

If you have a link or can send me a copy of the PDF, I can poke at it & try to find out why it's not working right. (Could ask questions but you probably don't know the answers to a lot of them--What size is the PDF? Is it image-only, or does it include text and/or vector artwork? What resolution are the images? Filesize is easy to check; the others require having software that'll give you that info.)

I don't have an iPad. I do have lots and lots of practice with PDFs. At the very least, I can save it out as image files and convert it to a .cbz file or potentially .epub or .mobi. (More likely: convert to image with better settings, and re-convert to PDF, which removes whatever glitchy bits are causing problems.)

[ysobel]

♥

http://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ImagefromIndex/27747

or if that doesn't work, http://imslp.org/wiki/Mass_in_C_minor,_K.427/417a_%28Mozart,_Wolfgang_Amadeus%29 and go down to "Vocal Scores" and "Completion by Georg Aloys Schmitt" and download the pdf under that.

And thank you! I appreciate whatever you can do :D

[elf]

Details (which you are not expected to understand or care about, but might be useful or interesting anyway): 10.3mb file, scan only, mostly 600dpi Jbig-compressed, some color scans. (Why people scan in color for B&W originals, I dunno; I suppose it's easier than fixing the settings.) Nicely bookmarked; good metadata. No OCR, which is very reasonable.

This means the pages are mostly 4550 x 6300 pixels, which is great for print & useless for the ipad, which has a size of 768x1024; anything with more pixels than that is pointless. (Well, not entirely, because you can presumably zoom in & still have it be useful--but you don't care about zooming; you want the whole page to show.)

Fix Attempt #1: Convert whole thing to B&W only, and downsample to 150dpi with Quite A Box of Tricks plugin. Result: 4.3 mb; if the slowdowns were caused entirely by filesize & page-loading time errors, this'd fix it. Mozart_CminK427_edit1.pdf

Fix Attempt #2: Save as tiffs, save as jpgs, load into FineReader, fix jpg-screwy pages. (I don't have a coherent simple way to describe this, other than saying--I suspect I know which pages are the problems: 11, 12, 20, 21, 33, 36, 39, 40, 48, 62, 110, 116, 119, 122, 126, 127, 130, 135, & 147: those are the ones with both bitonal and jpg scanned parts.) Bonus activity: remove black lines on top of some pages.

Save two ways: 300 dpi version, 7.5 mb, and 150 dpi version, 3.5 mb. Add bookmarks & metadata. Couldn't tell if the bookmarks are supposed to be nested the way they are or would be better all at a single level; left them as they are.

Let me know if any of those work, and if any of them work notably better for whatever reason. (And if none of them work right, I'm happy to try poking at them in some other way.)

[ysobel]

...I think I love you so very much.

Fix #1 solved the page-loading errors, but not the screwy version. But the 300dpi of Fix #2 loads quickly /and/ isn't missing pieces and therefore almost probably will work! (I have not tested it in rehearsal situation but it looks good from what I can tell.)

You are awesome and amazing and eeeee thank you <33333

[pne]

Do you have Internet at the kind of places where you want to read it?

If so, it might work to have Google Docs open the thing and you then view it via a web browser (presumably Safari), and see how that treats you? Then you can see whether Google Docs can handle whatever nasty bit is in the PDF correctly.

[ysobel]

No internet, no. Alas.