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Someone has asked me to make an ebook of their music book (sheet music). What is the best file type to use? I am hoping that people will be able to see it on as many devices as possible. It is currently formatted as a PDF.

Tesserae
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  • One possibility, that I unfortunately have no experience with, is to convert the sheet music to SVG. That would give you much better rendering/scaling than PDF, but would undoubtedly be quite a bit of work. – beaker Jun 14 '16 at 18:51

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My recommendation is to keep it as a PDF and let people read it by using a PDF app on their tablet.

As long as you have a decent sized tablet (9 inches or more), PDFs can look superb. I don't know if scores have any special requirements for size.

Another option would be to use a fixed layout epub http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Fixed_layout_ePub

The easiest way to do that would be to purchase a one month license to Adobe Indesign, import your pdf into it and do any necessary formatting adjustments (One month licenses are cheap, but the learning curve is fairly steep).

Aha, I have forgotten to ask the key question: do you want to sell it? If yes and you want to do through Amazon, that is a whole different question (your only option would be a fixed layout epub for Kindle).

Even if you say yes, I would still just keep it as a pdf and upload it to smashwords and sell it there (they accept pdf files for selling).

idiotprogrammer
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There is something called "the Lilypond music typesetting program". Louisiana music professor Jon Kulp describes how he used it ( and lots of other things) to make an ebook with music examples for his students:

http://jonathankulp.org/goetschius_rationale.html

geh
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