Hello,
after completed my new office/studio/room and placed the new touchscreen monitor on the piano, I realised that Adobe PDF reader is not the best solution for music score reading.

I realised also that no other commercial apps make a better job.

So, I dedicated some time to develop the PERFECT PDF reader for pianist!

Of course, I'm not a coder and it's a very simple application, but it responds to all my needs.

It works well with 16:9 monitor (better 20" at least), since 2 pages are shown in the same time. Also touchscreen is recommended, since you can easily use your finger to move the pages.

The perfect solution is 20" (or more) touchscreen and Windows 7... in this way you can easily zoom the pages just with 2 fingers. Believe me... it's great!

If someone is interested in giving it a try, please PM me.

Questions:
What are your requirements for a PDF reader for music?
What are the problems or failings in Adobe Reader when used for this purpose?
Have you tried other PDF readers?

Hi Mac,
good points. I try to answer:

Requirements: Windows Vista/7 with .NET 4.0 Framework

Problems with other PDF readers? Well... none in particular, but it's tailored for pianists. Let's see:

* Acrobat reader gives you only 1 page in full screen. With my app I can see 2 pages side by side in full screen, maximizing and zooming the real reading area according your needs.

* 3 modes page reading and moving:
book mode (1-2, 3-4,5-6 ...)
page shift (1-2, 2-3, 3-4 ....)
pin page (1-2, 3-2, 2-4 ...) - NICE!

* Big buttons for fingers usage

Next features:

* MIDI control
* Suggestions welcome!

I use Foxit Reader (for ordinary use, not for music scores).
It allows page scroll vs. page-at-a-time.
It allows 2-page side-by-side display.
It allows page-up and page-down to navigate.
It's free.
And it's WAY faster than Adobe.

I saw online two years ago a foot-pedal project for piano. The creator set up a pedal connected to a serial port, and provided a program that would generate a page-down every time you stepped on the pedal. This would work with many apps, including PDF readers.

It's obviously obsolete (who even has a serial port anymore?), it lacked any support from the author, and it really needed something more than just page-down capability. But it was a good idea and a good start. And cheap. But with its failings I guess it would be better to use a proper commercial solution, and there are several of those.

I've not seen a touch screen solution, though.

It ought to be possible to use one of the piano pedals as a trigger. We seldom use the una corda or sostenuto pedals. So ... assuming you're using a digital piano ... either of those pedals could be used to trigger a page change. The challenges are:
- Programming skills.
- If you're running a VST and it is "grabbing" the MIDI input, how can some other program pick up the pedal events?

It may be possible to use Cantabile midi triggers to launch DDE events to other applications, or something of the sort? I don't know, and can't know before I'm home

And I may be wrong but I don't think read access on MIDI inputs is protected the way outputs are, so you could also be able to hook onto your MIDI device from your pdf reader.

Adobe does show you two pages at a time in fullscreen mode. I use adobe every day in this way on my 28 inch (non touchscreen) monitor.

I liked foxit well enough. The main feature I liked was that you could have multiple documents open and they are just in separate tabs, like they are in Firefox. But my music is largely scanned from my books and for some reason it was almost unviewable in foxit. So I had to go back to adobe.

Not that I'm bagging on your project. Seems like a very worthy undertaking.

That first option sounds reasonable.

The second won't work because the input is streaming. Once a program has read data from the stream, it's no longer available to any other program. So, to make it work, you'd need a buffered front-end that would accept MIDI input, buffer it, and make it available to multiple programs.

As a beginner I like software which shows you a MIDI file as piano sheet which is automatically scrolled as you play. Usually there are additional features like which key to press, change speed, loops, etc. Something like that:

http://midisheetmusic.sourceforge.net/

But that's probably not exactly what you are looking for.

Mine doesn't, at least in reading mode. Are you sure about full screen mode (Ctrl-L)?

Yes, I do it every day. You have to change your preferences. Go to "full screen" and uncheck the box "fill screen with one page at a time."

Thereafter if your document is in two page view, when you press ctl-L you will get dual fullscreen mode.

I've done it both in acrobat 9.x and X.

Nice, I didn't know that. Now it works with 2 pages in full screen mode.

Anyway, it doesn't allow moving backwards with a simple click (or touch) on left page. I'm not sure about Foxit.

I think Foxit allows backwards and forward viewing of pages with one click or touch.

Don't forget 'PDF X-Change Viewer' - I believe this is better than FoxIt and gives Arobat a pretty good run for its money.

Cheers,
James
x

Hi James,
it works well with 2 pages in full screen mode, but it lacks the page moving through fingers touch.

Anyway, I like to point out this nice utility:

Bome's Midi Translator Pro

It allows to translate MIDI events into any software commands.