PDF eighth note flag anomaly

[shnootre]

Hi all

This is my first post here, after 17 or so years on the makemusic forum. So...hi!

Wanted to check in about a very strange pdf-related anomaly. I sent PDFs of the score and parts for an opera to the company premiering the work. They printed and bound the materials, and have only just discovered a problem. On some, but not all, of the materials, eighth note flags (only with upward direction stems) are missing, so that unbeamed eighth notes look like quarter notes.

This was not a problem when I printed proofs of the materials, and it is also not a problem when viewing the PDF on a computer screen.

Anyone ever experience anything like this before? (they are planning now to send the materials out for printing, but I'm wondering if there's a lest costly fix possible).

[David Ward]

I'm not the expert on this (one or two others on the forum should have fuller ideas), but just possibly opening the PDFs in Preview and then saving them while in Preview (as opposed to the earlier process of Print to PDF from Finale) may help. It's at least worth a try. This has sometimes been known to be a fix for this kind of anomaly (as discussed from time to time on the old forum).

[miker]

That did, in fact, seem to help with a problem I had, where the recipient wasn't seeing the dashed lines that I knew were there.

[shnootre]

Interesting. The thing is, I think I essentially did that. I took all the PDFs I generated from Finale, and in the case of the part-books, resaved them from within Preview. Nonetheless, I will pass the suggestion along. Any more ideas? All are welcome!

[mbhaub]

What printer are you using? This may sound stupid, but I used to have a laser printer that would sometimes omit things until I learned the problem was the printer didn't have enough memory to handle really complex pages with lots of items on it. Happened printing mathematical expressions as well as Finale pages. Bought a new printer with vastly more memory and never had the problem again. Just a thought.

[motet]

The O.P. has a Mac, Ron. Different animal.

[BuonTempi]

Does that mean that Finale pdf export works trouble-free on the Mac and that there are no other programs available for creating pdfs?

On the Mac, the OS has PDF generation built-in, so Finale simply sends its print output to the OS, and the OS makes a PDF. There is therefore less need for third-party software to do the same thing, and fewer products as a result. (They do exist, usually providing greater functionality to that found in the OS, e.g. Acrobat.)
As a result, generally, "if it's on the paper, it's on the PDF". However, because PDF is an interpreted language, it can represent the same data in different ways, and sometimes Finale manages to output something that non-Mac PDF parsers don't like. This is where the "Re-save in Preview" fix comes in.

It should be noted that Finale's built-in graphics tool PDF Export is equally flakey on MacOS as on Windows.

[zuill]

In my time, I've had friends who generated pdfs created on a Mac that others could not get to open and print properly. They would send the file to me and in Windows, I was able to get the proper result. So, at least with Finale, there seem to be issues with Mac getting the proper results with pdfs being readable by those without having the fonts on their system. Doesn't the Mac pdf built in feature have the option to properly embed all the fonts? Just curious. Also, aren't there third party pdf programs Mac can use? Seems to me that a third party program that gets the job done would be well worth using it.

Zuill

[BuonTempi]

Doesn't the Mac pdf built in feature have the option to properly embed all the fonts?l

OS X doesn't have the option NOT to embed fonts. It embeds all fonts by default, and that default cannot be changed. In fact, it doesn't have any options of any kind: it just converts whatever data it is sent into PDF. Any issue with PDFs not being parsed correctly will be due to some other issue, like glyph encoding, or some other quirk.

Finale does give different results if you Save As PDF or if you Save As PostScript and then 'distill' the PS file, either with Adobe Distiller or Apple's Preview. This is because Save As PDF converts the internal CoreGraphics data directly into PDF; the other method uses the intermediary step of conversion to PostScript, which has a more limited "vocabulary", and so irons out any subtleties or ambiguities in the data. Things like imported graphics wrk better via PostScript.
This suggests there's some problem in the way that Finale stores its data internally.

If you have a PDF from Finale that doesn't work, you should send it to MM, so they can assess the problem and fix it. I've seen problems with Smart Shapes in PDFs before. There may be other elements as well.

[Peter Thomsen]

… Finale does give different results if you Save As PDF or if you Save As PostScript and then 'distill' the PS file, either with Adobe Distiller or Apple's Preview …

Actually there is a third way which may - or may not - give a third, different result (depending on the Finale version):
Graphics Tool.
Graphics menu > Export Pages…
where you can choose to export as PDF.

In the latest update of Finale v25 you can only get true black in PDF files from Finale v25 via
Graphics menu > Export Pages…

[BuonTempi]

As I said, Finale's own Graphic export PDF mechanism is not without its own faults.

Finale hasn't done 100% K Black for many years, but 25 is certainly better than before.

[zuill]

Since CutePDF, for example, is available for Mac, it would be worth trying when all else fails. Just a suggestion.

Zuill

[motet]

Is there really a Mac version of CutePDF? I didn't see it on their website. I see references to CutePDF and Mac on other web pages, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.

[MikeHalloran]

The O.P. has a Mac, Ron. Different animal.

Does that mean that Finale pdf export works trouble-free on the Mac and that there are no other programs available for creating pdfs?

Basically, yes.

There are third party cheapo .pdf tools for the Mac. I've never found one worth the time and effort, however. All use the Mac OS distiller, including Adobe Acrobat Pro.

I have and use Acrobat Pro. It's expensive but has functionality missing in Preview. None of the cheapware can match it. Preview can do nearly everything I want but Acrobat Pro is much faster and the time savings is well worth the money, IMO. For the tasks where there is no time savings, I use Preview.

I'm pretty certain that either the OP or the person on the other end has a font problem. Since he can see it and the other party can't, I think I know where the problem lies.

[MikeHalloran]

… Finale does give different results if you Save As PDF or if you Save As PostScript and then 'distill' the PS file, either with Adobe Distiller or Apple's Preview …

Actually there is a third way which may - or may not - give a third, different result (depending on the Finale version):
Graphics Tool.
Graphics menu > Export Pages…
where you can choose to export as PDF.

In the latest update of Finale v25 you can only get true black in PDF files from Finale v25 via
Graphics menu > Export Pages…

Then there's that.

Some MM support engineers apparently don't seem to know that one yet.

[shnootre]

Hi all - I'm the O.P. - nice to see so much discussion.

In this instance, all the files were already generated, sent off, printed and bound before the error was discovered. I will take the advice about PDF generation to heart for the next project (going to postscript first seems to make sense).

As it stands, the company that discovered the problem sent out a few of the errant parts to a printer and they came back fine. And to be clear, the files show up correctly on their computer screen - but do not print correctly from their printer (not sure of the make and model of the printer - but the poster above who mentioned having a memory problem with a printer once sounded relevant).

I wonder if there's any step that could be taken with the already-created PDFs to get them to behave correctly (as they do on my printer, and on all of our screens).

Very strange. Not sure I've ever experienced a situation where what you see on the PDF on the screen is not, in fact, what you get.

[MikeHalloran]

Do the Graphics Tool Export method above and see if that fixes you up for next time. It's a few extra steps but, if it works, it works. You can use Preview to glue pages together when necessary—if you don't know how, I'll post that (Acrobat Pro is so much faster but most people wouldn't buy it just for that).


On the official MM site there's an indication that Finale's Mac export to pdf is buggy in 25 (duh!) and that they finally intend to look at it (in our lifetimes?). The problem is in MM's api, not the Apple distiller.

[BuonTempi]

Do the Graphics Tool Export method
On the official MM site there's an indication that Finale's Mac export to pdf is buggy

When you say "Mac Export to PDF is buggy", do you mean Save As PDF, or Export Graphic as PDF, because the latter contradicts your previous statement.

Can you post a link to the indication?

The safest way to make a PDF from Finale is to Save As PostScript first, then open that in Preview, or use Adobe Distiller. That will certainly ensure that what you get on the paper, you get on the PDF.

[MikeHalloran]

Do the Graphics Tool Export method
On the official MM site there's an indication that Finale's Mac export to pdf is buggy

When you say "Mac Export to PDF is buggy", do you mean Save As PDF, or Export Graphic as PDF, because the latter contradicts your previous statement.

I see no contradiction in what I wrote.

Can you post a link to the indication?

Nah... It's a time-consuming pain to search that. I'll let you do it. You'll know it when you see it... a couple of weeks ago if memory serves me.

The safest way to make a PDF from Finale is to Save As PostScript first, then open that in Preview, or use Adobe Distiller. That will certainly ensure that what you get on the paper, you get on the PDF.

I'm pretty certain that the last time I did it that way was in OS 9, perhaps with Finale 2002, maybe? When Apple incorporated a .pdf distiller in OS 10.2, I never looked back.

I did a lot of work with Apple to fix the scanning, file import and printing and .pdf issues that plagued the OS from 10.7–10.8.1. It's worked quite well at the OS level since 10.8.2.

[motet]

I suspect there's a confusion in terms. What does "export to PDF mean"? "Print as PDF"? "Save as PDF" (per BuonTempi--does such a thing exist?)? The term "Export" is only used in the Graphic tool, no?

[MikeHalloran]

I suspect there's a confusion in terms. What does "export to PDF mean"? "Print as PDF"? "Save as PDF" (per BuonTempi--does such a thing exist?)? The term "Export" is only used in the Graphic tool, no?

In Finale, with regards to .pdf, yea.

[BuonTempi]

I see no contradiction in what I wrote.

Mike, in the same post, you seem to suggest or advise that people use Finale's Graphic Tool Export to PDF, and then say "Mac PDF Export is buggy". Hence my asking if you mean that Finale's Graphics Tool Export is buggy, because it would be odd to recommend something that doesn't work well.

OS X's built-in PDF mechanism is "Save As PDF", and I would suggest traditionally more reliable than Finale's Graphic Export.

I hope you'll see that I'm not being needlessly pedantic, but merely asking for accurate terminology to avoid being confused or misunderstanding what you write.

With regard to PostScript, I've already outlined why this method does have advantages over Save As PDF directly. It's still the only way to get imported EPS images within a Finale document displaying accurately in a PDF. Also, as you may know, Apple have fairly massively re-written PDFKit in Sierra, and the quality of the changes has not been well received by developers.