David Gewirtz/ZDNET
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ZDNET's key takeaways
Yellow sheet music can confuse playback apps.
A command-line Python script solved the PDF problem.
Sometimes AI is best used to write the tool.
Recently, my wife, Denise, started singing with her church's choir. She has a lovely singing voice. She needed to practice all the new songs. The songs came in booklets, about the size of a trade paperback, printed on yellow paper. She wanted to scan those booklets into her computer as a PDF, remove the color, and reprint them larger, on 8.5-by-11-inch paper so she wouldn't have to wear her reading glasses to see them.
So one afternoon she came to me. She asked how she could remove the yellow background, but preserve the music itself, so that she could print it out without wasting a huge amount of color printer ink. If she printed it out in black and white, she'd still be using a lot of ink to print out a gray background, which would be even harder to see.
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She was also planning to feed the music into PlayScore 2, an app that plays the sheet music so that you can sing along to it. She was concerned the software might not like the background color.
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