Dorico’s .pdf won’t reach my customer

Dorico
1

Hello,

I do have a strange problem.
One of my customers complains, that he can not open my .pdf files (generated from within Dorico version 3.5.1). This might be an email configuration problem - but I don’t really know how this happened in the first place.
Normally I attach the Dorico PDF-file to my text only E-mail in macOS Mail application. There is a setting (which I always have enabled) „Alway send attachments Windows-compatible“.
Still my recipient will not receive the attachment - instead the pdf is added as text code (the same what you will see, if you open a pdf with a text editor).
I contacted the provider of my recipient and we did some test emailing. He too receives the “text gibberish“. Now I am wondering, if this is a problem with Apple Mail in combination with Dorico generated .pdf files. May be someone could shed light into this. At this moment I do have to send these little PDF files via WeTransfer to make sure my recipient will get his files. May be the email application gets confused, as I always add a text-hint with the file name of the attached file to the end of my emails:

This is, how I send the email:

with kind regards

Attachment: 05_Schicht_Veni Sancte Spiritus_nach H-Dur_Basso continuo_2020-09-09.pdf

[here I have attached the pdf file]


And this is how the emails turns up on the other side:

with kind regards

05_Schicht_Veni Sancte Spiritus_nach H-Dur_Basso continuo_2020-09-09.pdf

%PDF-1.4
%âã
1 0 obj
<<
/Title ()
/Creator (þÿDorico)
/Producer (þÿQt 5.14.0)
/CreationDate (D:20200909102133+02’00’)

endobj
2 0 obj
<<
/Type /Catalog
/Pages 3 0 R

…

2

Certainly a problem of Apple Mail. Is there an option where you can specify to embed attachments or not?

3

I doubt this is anything to do with Dorico. Does it behave differently with PDFs from other apps? What about JPEG? Word files?

It’s more likely to be a problem with his mail client. Depending what that is. You might be better off asking on a Windows forum.

4

Another thought. Try zipping up the pdf before attaching. Does that arrive intact at the other end?

5

Sometimes Windows doesn’t handle inline attachments properly.
Did you try to add your pdf as a real attachment with the “paperclip” at the top of the Mail window?

Thomas

6

You could also be running up against file-size limits (hence Ulf’s suggestion to zip it up). There are limits to the size of files you can send via email depending on who your host is. If you’re sending a large symphonic score or a series of scores that total more than approx. 15mb, then you’ll need to split them up into multiple emails. I think gmail limits things to 25mb currently. Others are less than that.

7

Thank you everybody for trying to help.
The file size of this example pdf is small, just 73kB.
For Apple Mail it does not make a difference, if one uses the paperclip to attach a file or drag it into the email text body or drag the attachment onto the application icon.
Especially as I do send all my emails text only format the attachments are definitely not embedded.
Yes I thought of this, and next time I will send a folder containing the pdf file (Apple Mail will convert this into a .zip attachment). The problem I ran into with this procedure is, that quite a lot of Windows users don’t know, how to unzip a file, as strange as this might sound… I am using macOS 10.14.6