PDF Creation

• Jun 18, 2013 - 06:59

I appreciate that the current windows nightly builds are experimental and have been using it to test the new flexible chord rendering system by Marc Sabatella. I have found the build to be fairly stable and the rendering of chord symbols excellent. However I have noticed an increase in the size of documents generated by the PDF creation engine - sometimes as much as 3 times the size. These are purely 1 line leadsheets with an average saved size of 45KB in Version 1.3, whereas when generated in the current published nightly build can be as high as 150+KB. Is this an expected behaviour? Thanks.


Comments

In reply to by steelman1991

Fwiw, in case anyone was wondering, I can't think of anythi about the chord symbol changes themselves that could be causing this. The changes are purely at the UI level. The actual mechanisms used to render chords hasn't changed a bit. I could easily imagine differences in PDF size depending on the font you use, but that's about it. I assume you'd find the sme size difference even in in a score without chord symbols. But if that turns out not be true - if PDF's of files with no chord symbols also turn out bigger on your system - let me know.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Hi Marc - sorry if I clouded the issue, but I wasn't suggesting that the inclusion of the new chord rendering system was the actual cause of the increase in size, merely pointing out the difference in saved file sizes between 1.3 and the nightlies. This happens with all scores irrespective of with or without chords, there is a slight reduction in file size without chord symbols, but this is relative, as the same file rendered in 1.3 is still 1/3 of the size of the same score saved to a PDF file in the nightly build..

Clearly something has changed the behaviour of PDF sizing, but I, like you doubt it is the inclusion of the new chord rendering system - Are you seeing similar results or are your results the same as in 1.3?

Thanks again for the assistance and reply.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

I think the difference comes from the fact that in version 2.0 text is converted to path during pdf export.
Indeed, if you save the same file in 1.3 and in 2.0, you can select the notes of the 1.3 pdf file as text, while you can't do the same for the 2.0 pdf.

Conversion to path was introduced to preserve shapes for svg export.
Since pdf embeds the proper subset of the font, this extra step is not probably necessary in this case.

Ciao,
ABL

In reply to by ChurchOrganist

Most of the text is not converted to paths and it's not linked at all with the SVG export. Let's not mix things...

The musical elements are indeed not exported as text anymore and it's due to the fact that Musescore development version is using an OTF font. Apparently, Qt can't embed OTF fonts while creating PDFs. We will roll back to TTF asap and that will solve the PDF size issue.

In reply to by [DELETED] 5

Sorry for having created confusion.
I tought that the conversion to path for pdf was related to the same thing happening for svg (I searched about text to path conversion through the forum and the svg behavior was what looked more similar to what was happening here).

Next time I will try to perform a deeper search through the forum posts before wild-guessing :-)

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