Running Dorico 2 and Windows 10, I am finding that Dorico does not allow me to change printers within a session. Once I have selected a certain printer (an inkjet for example), I might then want to print to PDF by selecting PDFCreator. Dorico lets me make the selection and it displays PDFCreator, but the prints still go to the inkjet. I must completely shut down Dorico and restart in order to select a different printer.
Anybody else see this behavior?
Which printer on your system is selected as the default in the Printers thing in Control Panel? Do you find that it always prints to the default printer, or is it specifically only to the first printer you choose in a given session? We did have a bug a while back whereby only the default printer could be chosen, but that has been fixed (or at least I believed it to have been fixed).
For PDF specifically, you should find that Dorico’s built-in PDF export works pretty well, by the way.
I am not near my computer at the moment so I cannot say 100%. However, it seems to me unrelated to the Windows default printer.
The behavior I think I observed was:
Launch Dorico and open a Dorico file
Go to PRINT mode and select a printer
Print the job. – That goes to the right printer, regardless whether it is the default printer or not
Without closing the project, select a different printer. The Dorico dialog shows the printer newly selected.
Print the job. It goes to the FIRST printer selected, not the one currently selected. And changing settings does not seem to ever shake it loose from the first printer selected.
The only way I found to direct output to a second printer is to completely shut down Dorico and start step 1 again. At that point, I can select any available printer and it works – but then remains locked to that printer.
Yes, that does work very well. In my case, I generally create a single PDF rather than a separate file for each part. I don’t see a direct way to do this with Dorico’s export.
That is possible with PDFCreator, as PDFCreator gives you an opportunity to merge the separate PDF files before saving. There is a problem with that, however, in that the timing of things causes the parts to appear in a more-or-less random order. I would normally save the parts in score order within the final PDF. PDFCreator gives you the opportunity to change the order of parts before saving them. I do that with Finale easily because the parts appear to PDFCreator with identifiable names (Flute 1, trumpet 2 etc.) However with Dorico using PDFCreator, all the parts appear with the same name “document…”, so I cannot see how to order them.
It is no big deal. I can take the parts into PDF Architect (or a similar program) and reorder the pages. It is just an extra step. it would be nice if the PDF export in Dorico included the option to append all the prints to a single PDF, and to do so in the same order as the layouts appear on the left of the screen.
We do plan to make it possible to do a complete PDF export into a single file in due course, as well as to provide a bit more control over the filename that is produced. Thanks for the feedback. I will try to reproduce the problem you describe with your printer tomorrow when I have access to a Windows computer.
On Windows 10 I can’t replicate Craig’s problem, exactly using his instructions.
I’ve only got one “real” printer, but I’ve got a variety of PDF “printers” and Dorico 2 seems to allow me to print to the real printer and then print to any of the PDF printers, or print to any of the PDF printers and then to the real printer, etc. etc.
Don’t waste a lot of time on it. There was quite a bit of wierdness going on. For example, for a period, my right-click menu would not show all the filter options. I rebooted Windows. It is possible that something was seriously out of whack in the underlying OS. I will be using the built-in export to PDF, so it won’t be an issue for me.
If I do observe a repeatable pattern, I will update this thread.