Future proof music

[Mats_Frendahl]

As @FredGUnn writes in

Astonished at Finale news!

This is the path I’m planning on taking. @Mats_Frendahl was pointing out that even PDFs aren’t foolproof as there could be font embedding issues. If I forgot to uncheck this box … [Fin] … back when I “printed” a PDF from Finale, then there might come a day when the fonts aren’t supported, and then they can’t be viewed. I’m not sure I can afford the drive space to use TIFF for everything, but it’s an interesting quandary. Too bad Finale didn’t already have an MNX exporter implemented when t…

I tested this check box in Sibelius 6.2/Acrobat Pro (on PC) and the option added 34 bytes to the PDF. Strange. Seems little for embedding font information. (Adobe removed the full font embedding years ago since commercial fonts could be extracted from a PDF so I wasn’t expecting it to include all needed fonts.)

I’m not sure what happens when generating a PDF on Mac using Dorico.

When I open a PDF made by Dorico (made on a Mac) on PC that does not have Bravura installed it

— opens fine in Acrobat

— fails in Adobe Illustrator with no “music” shown, only system lines and other basic graphics objects

— opens fine in Photoshop

Clearly, there is something Illustrator cannot interpret.

Saving the PDF as EPS in Acrobat ‘enhances’ the output from PDF/Acrobat and the resulting EPS can be opened in Illustrator. Text strings are not preserved but fonts display correctly.

Converting EPS to PDF using Acrobat (or Distiller) leads to a PDF that can be opened in Illustrator but only after Illustrator outlines the text. It’s basically the same as opening an Acrobat EPS.

Saving as SVG in Dorico and opening in Illustrator gives a font error and all(?) but time signatures seem to be OK. (A simple music page was used however.)

I would suggest an option for ‘font inclusive’ export[1] from Dorico as an option. Or even better(?), an option for ‘outline all fonts’ to remove all need for external or internal fonts. (Was this not how SCORE once worked? Amadeus works like this, given the correct option at export, it even has an ‘Include full fonts’ option, how legal that now is today…)

1. Clearly commercial fonts cannot be included (or can they, given Acrobat restricts extraction of fonts today?) but Bravura and other ‘free’ Dorico fonts could.

Converting a Dorico PDF to PDF/X using Acrobat did not help when opening the PDF/X in Illustrator

What is a PDF/X File and How to Use it | Adobe

Adobe announced some time ago that they drop support for Type1 fonts
https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/kb/postscript-type-1-fonts-end-of-support.html
(This has no impact on Dorico output unless you use those fonts.)

What works today might not work as expected in 2034 or 2044.

The ‘end all discussion’ solution is naturally to save as TIF…

‘Future-proofing your Dorico project and output’ would be a relevant and interesting chapter in the Dorico documentation.

Edit: PDF/X is for prepress and “portability”. PDF/A is for archiving. I tried saving a Dorico PDF as PDF/A. It still fails in Illustrator. I’m not sure why. I’m using an old Illustrator version pre “drop Type1 support” so it’s not the “latest and greatest” that causes this.

[dspreadbury]

Given that Dorico’s fonts are available under a permissive license, and are already available separately from Dorico via GitHub, I don’t see any value in embedding those fonts in Dorico projects. Embedding other non-standard fonts would be useful, but would often end up in violation of licensing agreements, so it’s not something we’re likely to pursue.

Make PDFs. Make MIDI files. Make MusicXML files. Back everything up. If you do all of those things, you’ll be better prepared than most!

[hrnbouma]

For a while I’ve been toying with the idea of just getting all my scores printed and bound in a couple of big volumes, then storing those at a library or bank somewhere. Can’t get much more future-proof than that, but it’s a massive undertaking.