Crop

While an iPad is better than paper in many ways, its biggest disadvantage is that the device’s screen is smaller than a standard page of paper. Fortunately, a lot of things about paper become obsolete when going digital, like large white margins around the edges to ensure that your music is readable even near the binding where the pages curve inward.

Cropping is hardly a forScore-specific feature, and most people already know about it, so with today’s feature of the week we wanted to take a moment to explain a more subtle aspect of forScore’s implementation called auto-crop. When you choose “crop” from the tools menu, the first thing forScore does is try to find the margins on your page for you. It simplifies the image data and looks for light and dark areas to figure out what’s important and what’s not. Once that’s done, forScore zooms in and repositions your page to its best guess. If it’s correct, all you have to do is hit the “Crop” button and you’re done. Otherwise, you can still adjust the zoom and position of your page as needed.

We’ve done a lot of work to make this feature as accurate and quick as possible, but it’s still a best guess. Pages that are darker overall can produce false positives and auto-cropping may seem to never kick in at all, and processing this information is still too intensive to crop every page for you automatically. That’s why we do our best to get you 90% of the way there, and let you make any final adjustments as needed.