Mac - Print dialog does not appear if no printers are configured
I have installed the latest MuseScore 3 on a new macOS 10.15.7 system. When I have a score open and press ⌘P to print (I wanted to print to a PDF), the print dialog never appeared. Other apps on the system do display the print dialog.
I turns out that this is a long standing Qt bug, reported in 2014, and fixed in March of this year. It is currently in the latest Qt 5.15 beta, so I expect it will be available in Qt 5.15.
Until MuseScore bundles Qt 5.15 or later, the workaround seems to be to add a hardware printer to your macOS system. After at least one printer is configured, then the print dialog is displayed by MuseScore.
Note: for anyone who says I should export as pdf instead of using print, I say that (on macOS anyway) the native print to pdf capability produces a much cleaner result than MuseScore's export as pdf function (which, itself, is probably another Qt issue).
Comments
As MuseScore 3 will stay on Qt 5.9, this issue won't get fixed for MuseScore 3, but it will or already is for MuseSocore 4, which already (well, its development version) uses Qt 5.15.1
Why would you need a printer dialog, if there is no printer attached?
Why do you try to print, without a printer?
Won't a PDF printer do?
In reply to Why would you need a printer… by Jojo-Schmitz
On Windows a PDF Printer must be installed (Window 10 has one "pre-installed") and the PDF printer then shows up in the device list. On macOS the PDF printer is not a separate device in the printer list; it is a built-in function accessible via a pulldown list control on the system's print dialog. That "PDF" pulldown control at the bottom of the dialog gives options like "save as PDF", "save as Postscript", and then various other actions where a PDF is generate and store in the Downloads folder, or generated and sent as an email attachment.
As far as why I want to use the print dialog without a printer, I addressed that in the "note" paragraph at the end of my defect report -- so I could produce a PDF using the macOS built-in PDF generator (because it has better results than the MuseScore 'export as PDF' function). I've been doing it that way since the early MuseScore 2.0 days.
On the contrary, the macOS PDF generator is known to have some issues with MuseScore (and ever since), like not embedding the fonts, File > Export > PDF is to be preferred.
Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.