[Alan Evans]

I often have to load .pdfs people have sent me into MSP. The problem is that these pdfs are often slanted (differing per page) which means I end up with a stiff neck and/or cross-eyed trying to read and play them.
It would be ENORMOUSLY helpful if it was possible to rotate each page seperately (in percent) in order to make the music appear visually straight on the screen.
Would this be possible to implement Mike, or is it something that you say I should give up on?

I could, of course, fix the pages in Photoshop, and I figured that if I were to start doing it in Photoshop tomorrow, I should finish somewhere around 3 months after I'm dead.

Save me, please

[Zubersoft]

You can rotate each page by factors of 90 degrees, but at the moment, rotating pages by an arbitrary angle is not supported. The reason for this is that a number of things become significantly more complex when rotating by a value that is not a factor of 90 (that's why many apps don't support that). For reference, to rotate each page individually, tap the "Settings" action at the top of the song editor and change the "Apply Rotation" to "Current Page Only".

I'm not sure if I'll be able to support that feature... I've wanted to implement an automatic deskew feature, but that's fairly complex as well (as it basically involves the same kinds of calculations). I think the only way it would be possible is if it's a destructive action, meaning that, unlike the normal rotation feature in MS Pro, it will rotate the actual file itself so that I don't have to do any crazy calculations in MS Pro. For a PDF, this would mean overwriting the original PDF with a new one that I would build (which can potentially increase the PDF size a lot and make it slower to load as the PDF library I'm using for that isn't great at optimization).

[Alan Evans]

Oh rats, Mike, I was afraid you would say that :-(
I know of the 90 degrees rotation posibility, but that won't help as the printed music/text would still be slanted (only on it's side ;-)

It's really just the arbitrary angle that would help. An auto deskew feature would require some sort of intelligent algorithm that guessed how crooked the music was on the page, I assume. Now that would be quite a feat to achieve!

But if some brilliant possibility pops up into your head about how to do the arbitray rotation, I'll be first in line to thank you profusely and call the bartender over.
Thanks for your quick response :-)

[GraemeJ]

Almost every Android scanning app I have looked at will automatically correct skew (they have to, it's unlikely you would do a scan without some).

I'm wondering if there is one of these apps that would take a pdf file as input and then correct it? Might be worth having a look around and see if such a thing exists.

I don't think Mike's concerns about it being a destructive actionare that much of a worry - who would want a skewed display anyway?

[Steve B.]

Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional is available as a free download from Adobe.

It's an older version with far fewer features than the current version, but it does have an option to 'Optimize' an existing PDF document.

One of the options in 'Optimize' is 'de-skew'.

I've never needed to use it (and I don't have any skewed PDFs to try it on), so I don't know how well it works.

Considering that it's free, it's probably worth a try. Nothing to loose, eh?

Steve

[Alan Evans]

Thanks, Graeme and Steve.

I actually took Graeme's suggestion that an app might do the trick and google-oogled the question until I got Acrobat as a possible solution. Lo and behold, I actually own Acrobat X Pro. Stupido moi.
There is no manual deskew function in Acrobat. Deskew is one of the automated options you can choose as part of the Document Processing function.

Well, after some trial and error, I can say that it works. Sometimes. Or rather, sometimes the results are close to perfect, sometimes the end result is no better than the original at all. It's better than nothing, but as I said, the results are hit and miss. Why it works sometimes with some .pdfs and not at all on others is beyond me. I thought it might have something to do with schmutz on the page built up from bad copies, so I first cleaned it up in Photoshop, then created a "cleaner" .pdf and tried again. No luck. Strange, but having to clean a .pdf before deskewing is so time intensive that it negates the possibility of that being an option. Not that it helped.

It's now clear to me than an automated deskew function is only partially okay.
A function to deskew in percent is really what's needed.

I guess we're back to pleading with Mike ;-)

[Skip]

Maybe one of these will work.
http://download.cnet.com/s/deskew/

[GraemeJ]

Check out the Android app Scantex - https://play.google.com/store/apps/detai...al.ocrscan - This allows you to load an existing pdf file and can deskew it.

I didn't have any bad pdf files (I corrected mine a long time ago) so I just took a deliberately skewed photograph and then got the app to process it, worked pretty well.

[Morgano]

+1 on this feature.

Coming from ForScore, I have used its manual de-skew feature fairly often to help with manual scans, so it would be a 'nice-to-have' on MS!