On 26 Aug 2006 at 10:46, dhbailey wrote: > I've never had a problem with the appearance of PDFs from Finale, > since I simply print to a PDF application. All the data that gets > sent to a printer is sent to the PDF creator application, so any > ugliness or problems is the fault of the pdf creator, not Finale. > > I just printed to pdf from FIN2007 and it came out just fine.
It depends on what you use to view the PDFs. Finale creates PDFs that with Acrobat Reader's default settings have staff lines that are way too thick (and uneven). The 6.x version of the Adobe Reader had a setting for line smoothing that if turned on made this display problem with Finale-generated PDFs go away. But the same setting in the 7.x Adobe Reader does not fix the problem. And I create all my PDFs with PDF995, as you do. The problem is with the way Finale is describing the staff lines. It's done in a way that stores a description in the PDF file that doesn't render well. I would think each staff line would be a line of a certain width, but if I'm remembering correctly, Finale actually paints thicker lines not as a single line with greater thickness but as two or more lines placed together to make the thicker line. That may not be the exact situation, but if PDFs and Finale are using different assumptions about what is represented (and thus how it should be scaled at different resolutions), then the results will not always be identical. Remember that thin lines have to be scaled differently at high and low display sizes, otherwise, thin lines at 100% will disappear entirely at, say, 50% of so. Thus, the scaling factor has to change according to an interpretation of how thin lines should appear. Different drawing methods could then produce different results. Consider what would happen if the lines were actually defined as two close lines instead of as a single line with increased thickness. If Acrobat Reader tries to render both lines using it's normal variable scaling, the result is going to be two lines rendered very close together, whereas the correct result would be to simply ignore one of the lines entirely. Again, I don't know that this is what actually happens, but it is an example of how the results could be unreliable based on how the data are defined. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
