Bookmarks

In an ideal world, each of the PDF files in your digital music collection will represent a single score. Metadata like composers, genres, tags, and labels let you organize those files into more abstract collections (like which publication it comes from) without losing the flexibility of having individual scores in your library.

Thanks to centuries of publication standards, however, you’re bound (pun intended) to come across a PDF that’s either scanned from or published digitally as an exact copy of a larger collection. If you can’t or don’t want to split those scores into individual pieces, bookmarks are the next best thing.

Bookmarks in forScore actually come in two different flavors: a single reference to a particular page that works just like you’d expect, and a more advanced type of bookmark that lets you take a set of pages from one file and turn them into a new, virtual item in your library.

Simple bookmarks let you name a page so it’s easier to find. These bookmarks are only visible in the bookmarks menu while you’re viewing that particular file, and they don’t do anything beyond that.

With forScore’s more advanced bookmarks, you can essentially turn a set of pages from one file into a new item in your library. It doesn’t actually create a new PDF file, so it takes up virtually no space at all, and it opens up a whole range of possibilities: these bookmarks have their own metadata, they can be added to setlists, and they can even be turned into a completely separate file and shared with colleagues if needed. These bookmarks also show up in the scores menu, so they’re easy to find independently of their source PDF file.

One last bonus feature: if your PDF file has an embedded table of contents, you can use this information as is (like simple bookmarks—names that reference a single page), or you can use it as a starting point to create a full set of advanced bookmarks as well. Check out page 9 of forScore’s user guide for complete details.