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I have a simple question:  How do you make this great pdf files?

I would like to make my own practice regime, and I´ve been trying with the musicTex and is quite a hassle to find the right settings. I would like to know your way.

E‘s Reply:

I am a long time user of Finale. Some of the older PDFs that are on here, you can see that they are not as great as say the latest version of the Zinn Regimen, or the II-V patterns. If you do a search on Finale or Bill Duncan, you can see that I was inspired a while ago to really make the output “engraver quality”. Most all of the newer PDFs are done in Maestro font (Finale’s default) with additional articulations, rehearsal texts, oversized time signatures provided by Bill Duncan’s Font Package.

All that being said, Finale does not have some sort of Mojo that makes it all possible. Sibelius, which I purchased about a week or two ago, can produce great output as well. I’ve been tweaking a House Style that looks like my default Finale style. It uses their Helenski (spelling?) font. I’m not clear yet on how to get oversized time signatures, or how to create custom articulations. Soon. Though so far, Sibelius’s manual doesn’t help those who want to tweak their music, and the chord symbol stuff is not quite what I like (seems to be harder to make a C7 have the 7 float a little above the C).

Advise to you……..get something other than MusicTex. You can get Finale Notepad for Free, you can get great deals on Finale or Sibelius if you are a student or have an older program that you can upgrade from. Then play with it. Look at the print outs, and see if you like them. It really comes down to almost art in making a sheet of music look good. Spacing, using a text font that matches the notation font, etc.