Fonts not embedded in printed PDFs, printer settings missing

Tried printing/exporting (Adobe PDF, Dorico PDF, physical printers) under Windows 7. Was tossed to two things:

  1. Print Mode / Destination / Printer / Adobe PDF / Print does not embed any fonts used in the document (in Adobe PDF Settings “Embed all fonts” is chosen as a permanent Windows printing preference) whereas Print Mode / Destination / Graphics / PDF / Export embeds them.

  2. Before printing to any printer, I cannot find printer properties in Dorico to change or check the printing settings/preferences. Only page size and orientation are available. Normally, all computer programs used to print stuff let you choose and change the printer settings and preferences just before printing.

What am I missing? :question: :bulb:

Dorico does not yet show you a button to show printer properties on Windows, but we do plan to add this in due course.

I’m not sure why you might not be getting any fonts embedded when printing to Acrobat. I’ll look into this when I can next try this on a Windows machine.

I also find no fonts embedded using Adobe Acrobat printer on Windows 10.

To follow up on this: the reason no fonts are embedded during printing is that Dorico renders all font characters as outlines during printing. This is how the underlying Qt framework that Dorico uses handles printing when using DirectWrite, which is the most modern API for handling fonts and texts on Windows, and which provides the highest fidelity for on-screen appearance and handling of font features. We will definitely look at whether we can change this, but it will be quite tricky.

Fonts, however, are correctly embedded when exporting PDF using Dorico’s own built-in PDF export, so you might consider using that in the first instance, and then doing any necessary post-processing in Adobe Acrobat itself (which I assume you must have if you have the Adobe PDF printer driver).

I hadn’t tried exporting a PDF, and I found the fonts embedded, and the output was a little clearer than printing through Adobe PDF, (Acrobat XI). Definitely the way to go.

Well, that is exactly what I said and why I started this thread. Fonts are not embedded in printed PDFs, but are embedded in exported PDF’s:

David kindly and clearly explained why this is happening. Thank you so much. But I am still surprised to know that Dorico is the only program that I have seen using Adobe PDF in this way. Perhaps it is good, perhaps not, but at least it is highly unusual. To me, that is. :wink:

I sure have nothing against using Dorico’s built-in PDF export “in the first instance”, if I can have access to its settings. For example, currently only a resolution of 150 DPI seems to be available, and that is way too low for my and my publisher’s purposes.

I cannot see or verify this. Can someone else, please?

Adobe’s system is not exactly cheap. If Dorico’s own built-in PDF export really gives better results than Adobe PDF printer, there definitely is something wrong somewhere. :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

You don’t need to worry about the DPI setting when exporting PDFs. The PDFs exported by Dorico are scalable vector format files, so DPI would only make any difference for embedded bitmap graphics, and Dorico’s PDF export samples graphics at 1200dpi.

This is exactly what I needed to know. Thank you so much, Daniel. Highly appreciated.

Daniel, does the 150 dpi then refer to any (non-vector) graphic files embedded? (And how do you change it?)

If you change to one of the other file types during export (tiff, png, etc.) then you can change the DPI. For PDFs, you don’t need (or get to) control the DPI because it doesn’t apply. Vectors can be scaled to any size and then will print at whatever setting you decide on in your PDF viewer at that time.


I did however discover one quirk with PDF export-- if you control certain parameters of “music font” items, that will not be reflected when re-rendered in another PDF program. For instance, I had a hymn where 6 verses all ended in a refrain. I used a large reversed grand staff bracket to indicate they all condensed to the refrain. Due to the lack of a thinner character, I decided to make the staff bracket only 60% width using the shift-x control parameters. When I exported via PDF, adobe rendered that character full width which made it comically fat and it looks just awful, although I can print it natively from within Dorico at only 60% width. The problem is, I needed to email the PDF. I had to leave the fat bracket even though it looked bad because there was nothing I could do. The lesson in all of this is that apparently not all of the text parameters are exported and re-rendered in other programs.

I was assuming there was a reason to show a dpi value if you have selected PDF as print output.

Would exporting it as a jpg then importing it as a graphic work? (I’m not sure if you can place graphics exactly as you can in drawing programs; I have not tried yet.)

Don’t use jpg for anything that isn’t a “picture”. You risk getting a lot of artefacts where there are sudden large changes of color (e.g. black to white) because of the way the data is compressed.

png is a good general-purpose choice for everything else, if you can’t use vector graphics (i.e. svg).

Thanks Rob, yes PNG better (I am not familiar with all the formats Dorico can import). I did not suggest SVG because I thought it might end up with the same problem.