The demonstration continues

Following the thoughts at reference 1, I bought a second copy of 'The Art of Music', for a few pounds from Abebooks.

This turns out to have once been the property of the Musical Society of the Secondary School for Boys of Sheffield and had been bought by them in 1922. As far as I can make out, the same book as the last one, but printed on very much cheaper paper, very much like that of some of the books printed at the time of the second world war. Bing only admits to food rationing, a result of submarine attacks on the supply chain, but maybe there was paper rationing too?

Bing also confirms that the school once existed, turning up a catalogue entry from the National Archives, a book produced by the school's Shakespeare Society and a reference to the creation of the school in Leopold Street in 1880. But a school without distinction between boys and girls, so perhaps girls did not go to school at that time. And perhaps more a grammar school than a secondary modern school, these last not having been invented at the time and with some of their functions being fulfilled by the technical schools, the Portsmouth incarnation of which was attended by FIL for a year or so before he left school at 14.

I am reminded that Internet is not so clever at this local history stuff, as I had already found in the course of the search noticed at reference 2.

However, the point of buying the book was to take it too pieces, the better to scan the musical examples into Photoscore.

So the book was duly broken down into 24 8 page signatures, lettered A to X, plus oddments front and back to make up the whole. A rather messy business with broken bits of thread, glue and binding spreading far and wide.

And the examples do now scan nicely, with much less noise than when they are scanned from the bound book. But for some reason, the demonstration copy of Photscore has stopped behaving.

If I scan directly, from within PhotoScore, it makes a complete mess. If I scan by hand, print it out - a process which doubles it size and with it coming out rather well - a tribute to cheap and now quite old HP technology - and then scan it again, from within PhotoScore again, it does a little better, but still completely fails to convert the image of a couple of staves' worth of music to music. As I write, I don't know whether this is the demonstration copy degrading itself in case I try to avoid paying for it, my incompetence with the software or some other problem. Not a cheap package, so I am going to need to do better than this before I press the buy button.

I shall report further in due course.

PS: the good news is that I have now found out how to search within the current web page, something I have been wanting to be able to do for ages. Having hitherto had to resort to clumsy dodges like copying the page to Word.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/footnote-to-perfection.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/bears.html.