PDF printing oddity with hard space

[David Ward]

This may be of interest.

How it should have come back from the printer and (shown with the red arrows) how it did.

Everything else in the 247 page 1,317 bar score, including a little non-standard notation, seems to have come back as it should, but the hard space followed by hard hyphen appeared with this quasi exclamation mark intruding. The solution appears to be to save the file as a postscript (.ps) and then open it in Apple Preview (or Adobe Acrobat) and re-save ('re-distill') it as a PDF. The original file was 6 MB (much of which is the cover picture), the .ps was 55 MB, which when re-saved as .pdf becomes 35 MB.

Hard hyphens in the score which are directly after a word look fine, so I'm guessing that it's the hard space that is causing the problem.

It all (the original 6 MB file) prints OK on my domestic ink jet printer.

Have others encountered this sort of thing?

[miker]

David,

Why are you using the hard space and hyphen at all? I doesn't look to me like you need them in either of the locations.

[David Ward]

This is the relevant bit of the libretto. The hard hyphen is in effect an m-dash (which is needed) and, unless I'm missing something, a non-hard space would jump me to the next note.

[zuill]

You might have to replace the hard space with another blank character. I've seen something similar in the past. Of course, I'm on Windows, and I know Mac operates somewhat differently.

Zuill

[David Ward]

A small up-date, not yet put to trial:

Having concluded that the problem was probably specific to the Finale Lyrics font, I've used Text Search and Replace to find the total of nine instances in the files that make up the PDF where I have used hard (or non-breaking) space followed by hard hyphen (or m-dash on Mac) in Finale Lyrics and have changed the font for these to Times.

I'm hopeful that this will solve the problem, but I've not yet had the chance to put it to the test.