For the last decade I’ve been hoping that the Album Report from the Audio Montage in WaveLab looked better but it never really happened.
In my opinion, the native PDF export from WaveLab doesn’t look great, takes up too many pages and space for most normal length albums, with lots of wasted space and other inefficiencies as well.
While there have been some slight improvements to the native PDF export for WaveLab 13, it’s still not something I’m proud to send to my clients for proofing the non-audio data that goes with most EP and album mastering projects.
What started as a simple question to my friend and web-developer to see if he could make a template or formula that converted XML data to PDF turned into a website that allows WaveLab users to export an XML file from the Audio Montage, and the website takes this info and transforms it into a much more presentable and efficient PDF that in my opinion is much easier to read, decipher, looks more professional and is something I’m not embarrassed to send out to my clients.
In creating this, we found that the XML export of WaveLab 12 and earlier was missing some critical info which has been addressed in WaveLab 13. So in other words, you need to be using WaveLab 13 to for all the essential data to be present in the XML export that CueSheetPDF translates into a nice looking PDF.
You can find out more on the website and see some examples as well:
FWIW, I have nothing to do with the monetization side of this. I just gave my friend/web guy the idea and told him to do what he wants with it.
I understand that nobody wants to deal with yet another subscription but also, this isn’t realty something that can be sold. It’s not a piece of software you can download and install, it’s a website that processes XML files.
It must be maintained to continue working over the years so I think the nominal subscription fee is more than reasonable.
There is a yearly subscription that can be done so it feels more like a one-time purchase than another monthly subscription fee to pay/log but just wanted to point out that I have no control over any of this, I’m just the messenger.
oh yeah, sorry, didn’t mean to imply it was on you, justin! just a general comment..
interestingly, the PDF exports in WL13 have somehow gotten WORSE.. now there are no dividing lines/boxes around the text, so it looks more like a raw text file..
ugh!! now they’re actually fairly embarrassing looking…
is there a way to get the grey boxes and grid line back on the PDF exports?
13 seems to have imported all of my prefs and settings from 12 no problem… but these new reports really do look terrible.. and i don’t see any settings to bring back the grid and box separators.
Some default settings were changed in the album report. If you reuse a past preset, you might have to activate or deactivate some options again.
Generally, after several iterations of changes, checked by some users, the WaveLab 13 reports are meant to be better looking. Now this might not suit the taste of everyone.
I recall that there is always the possibility to generate an HTML file and then export it to PDF. This is another route that can lead to slightly different results.
selecting HTML as the output format gives you the grid and grey.
selecting PDF as the output format gives you a more refined result featuring the grey highlights without the grid.
If you must have the grid in a PDF document, it’s possible to convert the HTML to PDF, as mentioned by @PG1. First, open the html document in Firefox or Chrome, for example. Then select Print and Save to PDF. Also make sure to select ‘Background Graphics’ in the Print Options - this option is what gives you the grid and the grey in the resulting PDF document.
but why the extra step now? the images above are both PDF exports, no HTML involved.
and exporting to HTML puts the track box very separated from the information on the left and makes this super wide PDF that looks terrible.
i never had to deal with HTML before, always just exported a PDF and they looked in 12, as you see above.
this is the result in WL13 exporting to HTML and then saving from there as a PDF:
(i’ve screenshotted with a little grey border so you can see the dimensions properly on the white screen)
I have no idea. I was just providing a solution. Maybe Steinberg could consider an option to show/hide the grid when using the PDF output format.
I have not much idea about that either!
I don’t see a problematic result here. It’s perfectly usable and gives an A4 result with grid and grey and similar layout to WL12.
From the screenshot it looks like you might be printing to landscape or A3 format. What software and settings are you using to convert the file or Print/Save the file? Mac or PC?
Oh, hello @PG1, am interested in this too (but away from my machine) - when you’ve a minute, can you post output from WL12 and WL13 (with new changes) for comparison, please.?
