MuseJazz exports to PDF as bold on Windows

• Feb 20, 2015 - 23:26
Type
Functional
Severity
S4 - Minor
Status
closed
Project
MuseScore
Tags
2.0

I cannot personally reproduce, perhaps due to different Qt versions, but it is reported in the forum that the MsueJazz font is exporting to PDF in bold face on some Windows system. This seems distinct from the other known issues with PDF export on Windows. Apparently this remains the case even with current Qt 5.4.1 builds. But since other fonts appear to work correctly, I am hopefuly it will turn out to be some sort of flag we can set (or unset, as the case may be) within the font itself that will prevent Qt from doing this.

See http://musescore.org/en/node/47921

Comments

• Mar 1, 2015 - 18:46

Update: I *can* reproduce on my Windows machine (which is now running Qt 5.4), but I have no idea what the cause of this is. It affects PDF export from MuseScore but not screen display or print (even "printing" to PDFCreator is fine). I am thinking this will turn out to be a Qt bug that is triggered by something unique about MuseJazz. Right now I have no idea what this could be be. Before I start going about randomly trying different settings in generating the TTF file from the SFD (FontForge) source and seeing if one of them magically works around the problem, I am hoping maybe someone can give me some suggestions of things especially worth trying.

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• Mar 2, 2015 - 17:22

It seems there is a little more to this. If I compare the onscreen look of bold versus normal versions of MuseJazz, there is only a fairly subtle difference on Windows, but a much more pronounced difference on Ubuntu. The more subtle version I'll call demibold, consistent with Qt. The export from Windows shows all MuseJazz text DemiBold - whether it was set to normal or bold. The export from Linux shows normal as normal, but the bold text - which is pretty clearly bold on screen - shows as demibold.

I really wish I understand ore about how this all works. When we generate PDF, I don't even know if we are letting Qt render the fonts first and incorporating them into the PDF as bitmap data, or if we are embedding the font and letting the PDF rendering program deal with it. Hmmm...

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• Mar 2, 2015 - 17:24

If we'd let the PDF rendering program, deal with it, the very same PDF file should look different on Windows and Linux... so you should be able to find that out, right?

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• Mar 2, 2015 - 17:40

That was my thinking behind the "hmmm" :-). Unfortunately, unless there is more to it than that, this seems to not be the case. The Windows-exported PDF looks the same on both platforms, as does the Ubuntu-exported one. Still, I'm not convinced there isn't something to this.

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• Mar 2, 2015 - 17:51

One thing I have learned from this - the discrepancy is not just MuseJazz. FreeSans also looks different on Windows versus Linux. On Windows, bold FreeSans is only demibold, both onscreen and in PDF. On Linux, it looks full bold both onscreen and in PDF. FreeSerif seems one find. One obvious difference - there is a separate FreeSerifBold.tff font. So one possible solution here I will try is to generate a similar MuseJazzBold.tff font. I doubt as many people will notice or care about the discrepancy in FreeSans, both because it is less obvious and because it just isn't as likely to be used.

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• Mar 2, 2015 - 21:47

Trial and error wins again!

After a following a whole bunch of false leads down blind alleys, I finally figured out that setting the font weight to "Book" instead of "Medium" seems to prevent Qt from doing whatever it is doing to MuseJazz. More testing required, but it looks like I'll be able to cross this off my list soon!

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