Guide

Splitting combined PDFs and A3 pages

The scanner put every part into one file, or read A3 sheets sideways? Here is how to break that into clean individual parts in the browser – with no PDF software.

Digitising produces two kinds of file that do not belong in the archive as they are: the combined PDF, in which the feeder scanner dropped the complete set of parts in one go, and the A3 page, read sideways as a single sheet instead of two A4 pages.

Both can be straightened out in Notenarchiv directly in the browser. You need no Acrobat, no PDF tool and no second pass at the scanner.

Splitting A3 pages into 2× A4

Notenarchiv detects landscape pages by itself. Open a PDF containing them and a notice appears – “3 page(s) in landscape format detected (A3 scan?)” – together with the button Split selected. One click divides every marked sheet down the middle into two A4 pages, in the right order.

If you only need this for individual pages, there is a targeted route: in the page view, every landscape page carries the button A3 → 2× A4. On portrait pages it is greyed out so that nobody halves a normal page by accident.

A tip from practice: check the first and last page after splitting. If the scanner pulled a sheet in slightly off-centre, a narrow strip sometimes ends up on the wrong half. Those two pages are where it shows up quickest.

Skewed, superfluous and swapped pages

The same view holds the small corrections that come up after almost every scan:

  • Rotate by 90° left or right – for the page that lay sideways in the feeder.
  • Delete page – for blanks, cover sheets scanned by accident, or the back of a sheet that holds nothing.
  • Move forward / backward – when two sheets went through in the wrong order.

Every change applies directly to the stored file. There is no intermediate step where you have to download a corrected version and upload it again.

Breaking the combined PDF up by instrument

The most common case: a 40-page file holds the complete set of parts for one piece – flute, clarinets, trumpets, trombones, percussion, all in sequence. It needs to become individual parts.

The procedure:

  1. Upload the combined PDF and open it.
  2. Page through it and assign the matching instrument to every page on which a new part begins.
  3. Click Split by instruments and confirm.

Notenarchiv then divides the file at exactly those points and creates one continuous PDF file per part.

The key trick: you do not have to assign every page. Pages without an assignment of their own automatically inherit the instrument of the previous page. For a four-page trombone part you therefore only mark page 1 – pages 2 to 4 follow by themselves. For a 40-page set with twelve parts that is twelve clicks instead of forty.

Two things to know beforehand:

  • The original is deleted when splitting. That is intentional – otherwise the same music would sit in the archive twice. The confirmation dialog says so explicitly.
  • At least two different instruments must be assigned. If all pages carry the same instrument there is nothing to separate, and Notenarchiv declines the split with a note to that effect – the PDF is already a finished single part and merely needs its instrument assignment.

Letting the AI help with the assignment

You can save yourself part of the paging through. Mark once the area of a page where the instrument name appears in your music – usually top left or centred above the first stave – and run the AI instrument recognition. It reads that area on every page and suggests the matching instrument from your ensemble’s list.

You review the suggestions and apply them; after that the split is a single click. This works best with clearly printed instrument names. Handwritten labels, very small text and faded copies remain manual work. More on this is on the page about AI instrument recognition.

In which order should you work?

When one file has several of these problems at once, this order pays off:

  1. Split A3 – only afterwards do the page numbers everything else refers to actually hold.
  2. Rotate and delete blanks – so nothing superfluous is in the way during assignment.
  3. Assign instruments (by hand or via the AI).
  4. Split.

Doing the A3 split after assigning instruments means assigning twice for nothing.

How to set the course correctly while scanning, so that as little rework as possible arises, is covered in the guide Scanning sheet music: resolution, format and settings.