Originally Posted by
davewerden
Good points above. One should also think about the fact that some sheet music won't scan on a typical home unit of the music is oversize. That can add a pesky barrier to getting the job done.
This is a good thing to keep in mind, and I'm loathe to make generalizations (particularly not knowing what sort of printers/scanners people "typically" have), but I don't think I've encountered a problem with this over the past 10 years of scanning in all kinds of (sometimes quite elderly) sheet music from several community bands. The oversize stuff can be irritating, but with some care I've always managed to get it scanned so that when I print it out, it at least displays on a standard (American) 8.5"x11" letter-size sheet.
My printer/scanner (which we've had for some years now) is a Canon PIXMA MX880 (now superseded by other similar models). For oversize music, I SCAN it as A4 size, and then PRINT it as "letter" size with the setting to "shrink to page". At times this requires careful placement of the page on the scanner bed (with edges just a bit off the bed), can involve some trial and error (), and may result in some of the "publication information" (usually at the bottom of the first page) not making it onto the scanned image (which I save as a PDF). But with a bit of care and patience, even fairly large sheet music is scanable in this way. You could otherwise scan it in as even some larger format, but A4 seems to work in general and to have good relative height/width dimensions. Of course, when you print it out on letter-size paper, there is some reduction in size of the text and music notation, but this is minimal and unproblematic. Or, of course, you could always buy A4 paper and print it on that -- but then it won't fit into a standard American 3-ring binder ().
Anyhow ... this approach has been working for me for quite a while. I suspect that most people who have printers/scanners have one with similar capabilities.
Gary Merrill
Wessex EEb Bass tuba (DW 3XL or 2XL)
Mack Brass Compensating Euph (DE N106, Euph J, J9 euph)
Amati Oval Euph (DE 104, Euph J, J6 euph)
1924 Buescher 3-valve Eb tuba (with std US receiver), Kelly 25
Schiller American Heritage 7B clone bass trombone (DE LB K/K10/112/14 Lexan, Brass Ark MV50R)
1947 Olds "Standard" trombone (Olds #3)