I really like music transcriptions. I've used Sibelius in the past for transcribing/engraving some of my music, and while it can be rather obnoxious, I like it better than the other "big" ones (Finale, MuseScore, Dorico). I've also used Lilypond and Frescobaldi extensively. In fact, my normal method is to transcribe stuff in Lilypond/Frescobaldi as I'm writing, and then engrave it in Sibelius later. So I only use like 10% of Sibelius' features, but that's the way I like it.

Anyway, in 2023/2024, I recorded an album, and of course I transcribed/engraved the whole thing. But this time, I thought it might be "fun" to make an actual physical book out of it. So I did.

Eventually I will go into more detail about how I formatted everything and tools I used to do so, but for now, a terse list:

• Sibelius v8.6.0 - I would use a more recent version, but I refuse to deal with modern Windows or MacOS, so I run it in my trusty Windows 7 VM via VirtualBox.
• pdfcpu - a nifty CLI toolchain for manipulating PDFs
• pdfunite - CLI tool used to combine multiple PDFs into one
• pdftocairo - CLI tool that I used for something, although I don't remember what, maybe my original overly convoluted attempts at adding page numbers
• Krita - image manipulation software, mostly used for manhandling colorspaces for print
• Inkscape - image manipulation software, used for tweaking vector designs that I received from the artist
• Firefox and Puppeteer to generate the inside pages (title page, table of contents, etc.). Chrome embedded the fonts in some weird way that was not compatible with print, but Firefox did it right.

Music songbooks (in North America, anyway) are 9in x 12in, which is a slightly odd size (apparently it's officially "ARCH A" paper size). I was mostly going for easing the amount of time and effort I would spend on this, which was growing rapidly, so I just looked at a bunch of online book printing/publishing companies and narrowed it down to two that actually advertised supporting that paper size: BookBaby and Dazzle Printing.

BookBaby was ~$450 for 25 copies of the book, while Dazzle was ~$600. So the choice was clear: I went with BookBaby. I really only wanted a maximum of like five copies, but I figured I could get maybe find 10 people that might actually want a copy of the book, and I'd just keep the rest. But then the closer I was getting to the end, it seemed like a gigantic waste of money to receive 25 copies of what was probably going to end up looking like trash, that no one besides me would want to read. I discovered that BookBaby's actual minimum order was 1, not 25, so I figured I'd save $350 and just get one for myself. Although they ended up sending me two copies, but I'm not sure if that was a mistake or I didn't read things properly.

Anyway, after all the annoyances with margins, figuring how to retroactively apply page numbers in the proper position, and endless editing and tweaking of the actual content, the book turned out pretty amazing, at least for something made by a non-professional.

Gratuitous images