Hi All,
I hope this helps somebody out.
I ordered some music from SheetMusicPlus over WiFi whilst using my laptop in a cafe in St Petersburg, Russia (I work on a cruise ship and finding free WiFi in port is a crew-member's favourite pastime!). I paid for the score, downloaded it and then had to print it out. Normally, I can print to a 'dummy' printer installed on my laptop (I use CutePDF, which acts like a printer but produces a pdf file instead of a physical document), but SMP would not allow this. I only had the option to print to a real printer or a fax, for which I needed a fax modem connected to my laptop (and I tend not to carry these around on a daily basis!)
So I did a bit of research, and came up with a bit of software called 'Virtual Printer Driver' (catchy name, eh?) from a company called Two Pilots (where DO they get them from!?!) The beauty of this is that it DOES show up in the list of printers that SMP's software can see. And it's FREE! You can download it from here:
http://www.colorpilot.com/emfprinterpilot.html
Make sure you choose 32-bit or 64-bit. It comes as an msi file (Micro-Soft-Installer) called VPD_Installer rather than the usual setup.exe, but just double-click on the file once downloaded and it will install as usual.
Once you've selected it as a printer, check the bottom right of your screen for the progress bar. It does a lot of clever stuff, but eventually you'll find the music saved as a pdf in the following folder:
c:/Program Files/Two Pilots Demo Printer/Output/name-of-music.pdf.
It ALSO saves your score in .bmp, .emf, .jpg, .png and .tif formats, which will all be in the same folder.
It seems this was written as a 'module' intended to be available to developers of larger products. But luckily, us mere mortals can use it as well.
As I said, I hope this will help someone out. But please DON'T email me or post on this forum for technical support, should it by some chance not work for you. I'm just an average musician plying my trade on cruise ships, and I have no particularly relevant technical knowledge. I just wanted to share my lucky find with someone else.
Right, where was Nevskiy Prospekt again?
