Can I brighten a bad scan or copy and paste measures between pages?

All Categories / Editing Your Scores, Working with Scores

PDF files are designed to display their information predictably and to look the same no matter which device or operating system you use to view it. The file extension stands for “portable document format,” and it’s generally only meant to be read, not modified (except for in certain specific cases, like forms with fields).

Although PDF files can be created from images, you can’t work with them the same way you might work with an image file. Instead of pixels, PDF files think in terms of vectors and points—relative measurements rather than concrete ones. They often include highly specific data that can’t be conveyed through an image, like web links, multimedia, or computer-readable text.

What this means for apps like forScore is that while we can allow users to take photos and make adjustments to brightness and contrast, once those images are saved into a PDF file those kinds of changes can no longer be made safely. As a result, any issues with your scans must be corrected before you create your PDF file.

For the same reasons, copying and pasting measures isn’t practical with an app like forScore. We provide additional tools that let you augment how your document is displayed (by adding annotations, for example), but we can’t modify the document itself in the same ways.

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