another try on DIN A4 default paper size

Dorico
21

Here a message from the OP :wink:
It is good to know (and new to me) that Dorico exports PDFs to the format chosen in Layout Options.
I always export to PDF, before I do any printing.
So my only issue left is how Dorico labels the Paper Size Options in the General Preferences.
What does North American versus International versus Automatic actually mean? Why is a North American less International? This is confusing…
ps: Daniel, a very warm thank you for working this through!

22

In theory, North American will give Letter, Legal and Tabloid and International will default to the ISO 216 paper sizes (A4 and A3).

Why? Well, because the US, Canada and Mexico use different paper sizes to basically everywhere else in the developed world. It’s North America versus everywhere else.

23

And I guess the mixup appears, because computers and operating systems are developed in that part of the world, which under these terms is not international. Internationally set up computers get weird results: A German, a French, a Scandinavian computer system runs into troubles and oddities (not to speak of Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Korean computer systems…).
This is sad, because using the English language in the computing world is such an advantage (programming language, all the shortkeys reflect a meaning etc.). At least it seems US and UK computer systems get the correct results (North American vs. International).

24

I believe I have found a bug with this, or at least a situation where I don’t understand the result. The following steps produce a PDF that is different from the size defined in Layout. This is on Windows 10 and 3.0.10.1051.

  1. Open New From Template/Jazz/Big Band.
  2. In Layout Options for the Full Score, specify 14" for the width and 11" for the height. Dorico automatically correctly switches the orientation to Landscape.
  3. In Print mode, specify Graphics, PDF, and hit Export. (Leave the orientation on the default)
  4. The resultant PDF is 22x14 Landscape, not 11x14 as specified in Layout.

If I manually select Landscape (instead of the default Portrait) under Page Setup then it will correctly export at 11x14. Of course if I have multiple items selected (like parts and a score) that have different orientations then manually selecting the orientation will screw up anything doesn’t use that orientation.

I guess when exporting PDFs Dorico generally can use the paper size specified in Layout Options, but not the orientation? Although it did get the Landscape part right, just not the paper size. So parts and scores that use different paper sizes and orientations cannot be exported together? I still have no idea why it uses the 22x14 size which isn’t specified anywhere.

25

Thanks for reporting this, Todd. I’ve been looking into it and can see what’s happening (some safety code designed for printing to a printer is incorrectly altering the output size for the graphics) and we’ll make sure this gets fixed in the next update.