Exporting to PDF and Printing Scores

• Jan 29, 2018 - 19:59
Reported version
2.1
Type
Functional
Severity
S4 - Minor
Status
closed
Project

When I export a score to PDF, it looks fine in the adobe viewer, but the dots on dotted notes come out as narrow boxes when printed from the Adobe viewer and occasionally other things come out strange.

When I print directly to my HP printer from MuseScore, it comes out fine.

When I print to the Adobe PDF printer, it looks horrible. Notes come out as letters with flags, text looks like Greek, but random mixture of numbers and letters and clefs come out as weir special characters. When I print from the viewer, its just as bad.

I'd like to be able to export to share with others and have it print properly.

Attached are the export to PDF and print to Adobe PDF files.


Comments

"printing" to a pdf printer, esp. Adobe's, is known not to work properly.
These is an option inside Adobe's printer to include fonts, try that for better results

OK, that addresses the print to Adobe PDF, but what about exporting to PDF. When I look at it in Adobe reader it looks fine, but when I print, the dot on dotted notes come out as narrow vertical boxes, the tempo marks didn't come out right either. I had it set to a quarter note equals 90 and what printed from the adobe reader to the HP printer was just an equal sign followed by a 9 and then a question mark in a box. That tells me that the font is not included in the exported file either.

I checked the Adobe printer and font imbedding is turned on by default and they are only not imbedded when font permissions don't allow. Could there be an issue with the proper fonts installed with MuseScore? Which fonts are included with the software so I can check that on my system.

In reply to by GeorgeW

The Adobe Printer PDF has this:
adobe.png

The MuseScore PDF has:
musescore.png

Bravura and MScore are the really missing ones in the Adobe Printer PDF

Tha MuseScore PDF file prints just fine here, also an HP printer.

Those MuseScore fonts are embedded into MuseScore, at least on Windows, and should not get installed in any other form or shape, this might lead to the problem you're seeing.

But then again we had other reports about MuseScore font issues on Windows 10, related to font permissions

The Adobe Viewer I'm using is part of the Adobe CC package which includes Adobe Reader DC, Adobe Acrobat DC and Adobe Acrobat Distiller DC. I'll check the fonts later today when I get a chance.

BTW, the email I get in response have a much smaller subset of the text I find in the on-line response. Sometimes its not very intelligible.

Status (old) active needs info
Status active needs info

To be perfectly clear: MuseScore's fonts are not installed onto the system - they are compiled into the application. When you export a PDF from MuseScore. those fonts are embedded within the PDF. So you should not ever seem any of those fonts installed on your system. They exist only within the MuseScore application and within the exported PDF's.

Thus, a PDF printing program should not need to - nor should it attempt to, nor would it be able to to if it did attempt to - find those fonts on your system.

If the program you are using to print the PDF does not show the proper symbols when printing, it must be that it is ignoring the fonts that are properly embedded within the file (if they weren't, it wouldn't display correctly on screen). So there is either a bug in the program you are using to print the PDF, or perhaps a setting you need to find to tell the program to use the embedded fonts and not attempt to substitute ones installed on the system.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

The program is Adobe Acrobat. When I first started using MuseScore, I didn't have the problem. However the problem developed after both had been updated a couple of times (I don't print often). Again, I can view the file properly in the Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, the problems show up when its printed to the HP LaserJet P2015D. When I print directly to the HP LaserJet from MuseScore, there is not a problem.

There are times when I need to send a PDF and the Exported mostly works and the print to Adobe PDF doesn't work well at all (MuseScore is the only program I have this problem with).

MuseScore can export to PDF, no need of a pdf printer, and most I came across so far are just not up to the task. Just don't use them and be done with it.

The only reason I tried the PDF printer was I was starting to see issues with the Export to PDF as I outlined earlier (the dots ion the dotted notes aren't printing properly and the tempo mark isn't printing properly.

As explained, if it looks good on screen, the problem pretty much has to be with your print program - Adobe Acrobat. So consider raising an issue with their support. But even if your program has a bug causing problems printing, everyone else you share the exported PDF with should be fine.

Do not use the print to PDF, though - that is guaranteed to be with due to the way MuseSvore manages it's fonts.