Sheet Music for Mac Pages?

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Level 1

4 points

Sheet Music for Mac Pages?

Hello friends,

I'm a composer of piano music who has recently completed a new set of books and I'd like to self publish them onto Apple iBooks. I have completed PDFs of both books with sheet music, artwork, etc. however, I'm having trouble getting it into Mac's Pages for self publishing on Apple iBooks.

It only shows the cover whenever I try to import the PDF. Is there a better way to do this? I've also tried to convert it into a pages document using an online resource but it does weird things to the fonts and shows all the actual music as weird symbols.

Ideally I'd like to keep the PDF looking exactly the way it does but just import it into Pages so I can publish on iBooks.

Any help or guidance on this would be very much appreciated. Thanks for your time!

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jul 23, 2021 1:04 PM

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Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

127,328 points

Jul 24, 2021 7:18 AM in response to VikingOSX

Plan B is to use Automator to split your existing PDF into separate PDF pages, and then drop these, one to a page, in Pages.

Launch Automator from your /Applications folder:

Select New document > Application and then click Choose. Automator will now open into a 3-panel arrangement with the Library, Actions, and larger Workflow panels respectively. Select the following and perform in order, dropping the action below the previous one on the large workflow panel:

Library > Finder and drag/drop the Ask for Finder Items action.
Library > Finder and drag/drop the Filter Finder Items action.
Library > Preview and drag/drop the Split PDF action.

Looks like this:

Save this application to your Desktop with a relevant name (e.g. splitpdf.app), and then double-click this application to trigger the prompt for a PDF.

I chose to save the individual PDF file output into a Desktop folder named Metadata. I dropped the file splittest.pdf, and the output files in the Metadata folder were splittest-page1.pdf, splittest-page2.pdf, and splittest-page3.pdf. You would then drop each respective single page PDF onto a respective page in Pages.

Keep in mind that publishing from Pages to Apple Books sets a 2GB maximum size limit.

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Answer 2

VikingOSX

Level 10

127,328 points

Jul 23, 2021 3:45 PM in response to My-Melodies

Pages only accepts single-page PDF as a document object when dropped on it. It will never display multiple pages of a PDF, nor give you access to them as it is not a PDF viewer nor PDF editor. As you have discovered, there is more promise than substance in attempting to convert a PDF into a proprietary Apple pages document.

Adobe Acrobat Pro can open your PDF and convert it to Word, and Pages can open a Word document. That too, will play havoc with your formatting as you see it in your existing PDF.

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Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

123,174 points

Jul 24, 2021 2:34 AM in response to My-Melodies

My-Melodies wrote: I have completed PDFs of both books

Since Apple does not accept pdf, perhaps you should go back to the app in which you originally composed your books. What was that? Can you perhaps export from those original files to a format like .epub or Word instead of pdf?

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Sheet Music for Mac Pages?

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