IMSLP Forums

What do you at IMSLP think about having a collection of various kind and types of blank sheet music paper?

Someone named Robert Dobbins (bob@threestrands.com) made some freeware available some time ago called "Win Staff Paper" or "WinSP." The copyright is 2000, and in the information window the author says "You are free to copy and distribute this software, but are not allowed to change the binary image."

You can set the margins, number of staves, distance between staves, bars per staff, etc., an save the configuration of a page as well. I've used it with only letter-size paper; so I don't know how it would work with other sizes on a printer. Worked well for me.

Anyone with a decent music typesetting package can export a set of various sized pages to PDF with blank or customised staves as desired...

Nominate your sizes/orientation/stave combinations below, e.g.:

A5/landscape/6 stave

A4/portrait/12 stave
A4/portrait/14 stave
A4/landscape/10 stave

A3/portrait/18 stave
A3/portrait/20 stave
A3/portrait/22 stave
A3/portrait/24 stave

Since scaling factors remain constant with ISO sizes I tend to use them exclusively, though I'm happy to do a set of “US” letter and folio sizes too.

It's common also to see some partially “pre-stamped” manuscript paper, usually for the combination of 1 unspecified instrument plus keyboard (treble and bass clef bracketed over two staves), so that e.g. A4/12 stave paper is already divided into 4 systems of 3 staves. Happy to do those too.

PML

I'm actually rather partial towards the idea of having blank manuscript paper on IMSLP. It doesn't take up space and is in my opinion a potentially (quite) useful addition.

It'd be nice to have several different types of blank manuscript paper for several paper sizes like PML suggests. In fact, PML, I don't even think you need to wait for people to request type/size combinations. I'd just put whatever I think would be used the most up, and add additional ones if people request them.

In fact, I'd like to request whatever you are going to do for A4 to be on Letter too; I know that here many people print on Letter and it is sometimes a pain to deal with an A4 document (though you can fit to page in most software).

I'd also suggest maybe throwing all the different variations for one paper size into a single PDF file. Less PDF files, more possible variations. But either way seems fine to me.

There could be 36- or 40- stave paper as well- A2. That's extremely difficult to find. Of course, I don't know if I could find somewhere to print it...

I succeded making manuscript paper with LaTeX like this. Hope you think LaTeX is a decent package!

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{a4}
\setlength{\voffset}{-1in}\setlength{\hoffset}{-1in}
\setlength{\textwidth}{20cm}\setlength{\textheight}{29cm}
\setlength{\topmargin}{0cm}\setlength{\headheight}{0cm}
\setlength{\headsep}{0cm}
\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{0cm}\setlength{\evensidemargin}{0cm}
\pagestyle{empty}

\begin{document}

\setlength{\unitlength}{1cm}
\begin{picture}(20,28)
\linethickness{.1mm}
\multiput(0,0)(0,1.7){16}{ \multiput(0,0)(0,.15){5} {\line(1,0){20} } }

\end{picture}

\end{document}

There are explanations with other packages in this thread:
http://www.mail-archive.com/icking-musi ... 00269.html

And here are two Latex online compilers you can use:

http://nirvana.informatik.uni-halle.de/ ... /latex.php

http://did.mat.uni-bayreuth.de/wassermann/fun/tex.html