I just printed out my first large project done with Dorico 2.
It’s a 178 page book done in InDesign.
The music pages are exported from the Graphics output in Dorico as PDFs.
The character font I use is Minion Pro.
Franky, one of the reasons I was moving away from Finale is because the PDFs it creates have similar flaws: it doesn’t print the note heads of 1/2 notes. Dorico seems to be a bit more random, as it affects some text strings, triplet "3"s, a few note heads (page 71). The measure numbers are funny.
Anyway, much of my music is published in print and sold on gigs and sometimes as PDF downloads from my website and it haunts me that somebody downloading it would have that problem.
I think if I print individual pages from this PDF all characters get printed. So I might print in 10 page increments. But it’s not very professional.
Since this happens with PDFs from Finale as well as Dorico (which uses a different music font) I suspect it has something to do with the printing system in OSX. Somebody on the Finale forum suggested that because there are hundreds of imported PDFs in my InDesign document, each one potentially containing a copy of the fonts there might be some ill effects.
Are you actually using an installed Italic variant of Minion Pro, or are you using regular Minion Pro and then using the dropdown in Dorico to get an Italicised version? If the latter, you’re doing it wrong. Dorico can mock up an Italic version of a font, but it can’t correctly embed it in a PDF. I believe that’s down to the QT PDF Writer rather than Dorico itself, not that that makes much difference to us users.
These are my font files:
MinionPro-Bold.otf
MinionPro-BoldCn.otf
MinionPro-BoldCnIt.otf
MinionPro-BoldIt.otf
MinionPro-It.otf
MinionPro-Medium.otf
MinionPro-MediumIt.otf
MinionPro-Regular.otf
MinionPro-Semibold.otf
MinionPro-SemiboldIt.otf
Peter, how are you exporting the PDFs from Dorico in the first place? Are you using a PDF printer driver, or are you using the direct export on the right-hand side in Print mode?
I’m certain that the font embedding for regular Western OpenType fonts like Minion Pro works correctly with Dorico’s built-in PDF export. If you’re taking that file and then putting it into InDesign and then experiencing the problems only when printing from InDesign, then that’s an additional variable that you need to eliminate: try printing the PDF directly without first placing it in InDesign to see if the same problems occur. Another option is that it’s your printer that’s dropping some of the characters due to a memory problem of some kind, and you might try updating its drivers.
Try extracting the two troublesome pages from your PDF (e.g. using Preview, where you can copy a page from the thumbnails in the sidebar and then make a new document from the copied page). Print those pages individually: do they still go wrong? If so, please attach them here so that we can take a look at them.
I’ve had similar issues whereas the built in PDF export from Dorico omits certain fonts. When that happens, using a PDF driver like CutePDF allows me to get complete PDFs out. In the attached case, Dorico also dropped the page number which uses a native font.
At least based on the versions I’ve been able to find on the web, Merchant Copy does not allow any kind of font embedding; Galderglynn Titling allows limited embedding using only a subset of the characters. You may be able to purchase different versions of these fonts that provide the capability to embed them; if not, you might consider using different fonts that do allow font embedding if embedding them into PDFs is required.
At present, the underlying Qt PDF writer won’t convert these fonts to outlines, which would be a nice improvement to have in a future version, and which I’ll follow up with their developers.
Thanks Daniel. I needed to use these fonts for a particular project. It wasn’t much trouble to use the CutePDF driver, but I’d rather use the built-in facilities whenever I can.
I am coming back to this topic two years later. Running into the same problem with Dorico 3.5. This only happens when I print from long PDF documents put together in InDesign, and only on pages containing imported PDFs from Dorico (or Finale, too). But here is my solution (I am on MacOS):
On my printouts I noticed that usually after 4 pages or so characters would start missing in the print. A sharp symbol in a chord or so. Little stuff. In the following pages more stuff is missing. Letters in the header, etc. After some more pages, it starts printing normally again, but then starts the whole cycle over. From what I have found reading up on it, this looks pretty much like a memory problem. The fonts used in the embedded PDFs are loaded and unloaded for every page (?).
In the print dialog of Adobe Acrobat, on the right side of the drop down menu where you select the printer is an “Advanced” button. This gets you to “Advanced Print Setup”. On the top right check mark “Print as Image”. Default is probably 300dpi. I set it to 600dpi. I think what this does is creating the bitmap for the printer in the computer rather than in the printer - or something. This did the trick for me.
OT: @peterkienle, if you’re still around on the forum. I’m curious, what instrument did you make this Bach transcription for? It’s way too low for a cello and even for a 7-string bass viol, apart from being mostly unplayable either way. Yet, it’s probably a string instrument. Is there one I haven’t heard of, or is it a transposition I’ve never seen before?
OT: After I bought an 8 string guitar there was nothing to practice sight reading. I have the Bach stuff in the computer. Just transposed it to the lowest possible range to get a workout. It sounds a bit muddy there.
