Hello - I have a project to print about 10 solo guitar transcriptions to give to my brother.
Transcribing solo guitar usually requires several voices (to allow for strings to ring). This results in a lot of rests that don’t have much useful meaning (IMHO!). In order to “clean-up” the transcriptions, I’m using the “select-all > filter rests > set alpha channel to 0” trick in order to hide the many rests that “clutter up” the transcriptions.
But I’m having a problem with printing (to a printer, or to a pdf).
Here’s a snippet of the score (after select all, to show the rests):
Here’s the view in Print mode (the rests are invisible, as desired):
But, when I print to a printer or to a pdf, the invisible rests are occluding the underlying staff lines:
Now, I admit that the “alpha channel to 0” technique is a bit of a hack, but I’m puzzled that the print preview is perfect, and the printing is not!
Any ideas? I don’t want to delete the rests, because for any further editing, I would like to show the rests (they are rather useful!).
Way too much faffing around. Here’s a better way, I think. Hide rests as required. using ‘Remove Rests’. Then Dorico can reveal them again if you deselect ‘Ends voice’. for the notes in question. You can use filtering or selection to apply this setting to multiple notes. Give it a try! It’s easier to do than describe.
I know when I print, I get colors (I highlight difficult passages in blue). I’m not sure what you mean by mono vs. color when printing to pdf, but both direct to printer and pdfs exhibit the same problem (and have colors).
I’ll play around a bit more tomorrow, to make sure I’m not doing anything dumb.
I’ll try that technique. I’ve used “ends voice” in the past to remove several rests, but in this case I want to hide all rests (admittedly, a strange thing to do, but again, if I have 4 or 5 voices for a guitar, I get many rests without much meaning).
Tom, if you could attach your project here with its hidden rests, I’d be interested to give it a try myself. It shouldn’t be necessary to print in colour any more to have items that have been set to be completely transparent be omitted from the print or export rather than appear in white, so it would be interesting to see a project where this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Thanks, Daniel - I’m using the latest Dorico Pro version (5.1.10.2081). I’m attaching a project, and a pdf output. You can see the problem in measures 1, 3, 8, 16, and 24 (and others later on…).
I use the “Full score for printing” layout for printing. Again, the problem occurs with both a direct print, and print to pdf.
I may be doing something dumb here, but in any case, thanks for looking into this!
Tom
UPDATE! - I have been creating pdfs by using a “printer” destination of “Microsoft print to pdf”. If I use “Graphics → Pdf” (color or mono) the problem does NOT occur. This will certainly be a good workaround for my purposes. However, it still seems like direct printing (to a printer or pdf) has the glitch.
Thanks for attaching your project, Tom. We’re able to muck around with the way transparent items are handled when we export PDF, because we’re intercepting the drawing calls on their way to the PDF writer, but we can’t do that when you print directly, either to a real printer or a virtual one.
If your goal is to produce PDFs, it’s always better to use the built-in PDF export features of Dorico rather than a virtual PDF printer.
My next solution was to change the rests to quarter notes, hide the noteheads and stems, and suppress playback. Unfortunately, it looks like “Hide noteheads” may use the same alpha channel trick under the covers, because when I put the notes on the staff and printed, I saw two little white ovals interrupting the staff line. So I moved the noteheads down below the staff and also hid the ledger lines, and now it prints as desired. It’s interesting that hiding the stems doesn’t leave anything behind.
(I know that I could also have moved the rests vertically off the page, or removed them and then used a spacing change for this measure.)
Right, that’s what I did. But as I noted, the hidden noteheads on the staff left little white “shadows” when I printed the page, just like rests with alpha=0. I had to move the noteheads below the staff to get things right.
Photo of printed page with white ovals where hidden note heads are:
Hmm, interesting! I can’t reproduce that. What OS and Printer are you using? Do you get the same results if printing from a PDF too? Or only directly from Dorico?
If I have this on screen, with the rests in the first bar hidden with Opacity set to 0 (Mac), and the second bar with quarters hidden with Properties …
That is interesting – those are two of the things that I tried.
I’m on Windows, printing to an HP Color LaserJet Pro M277. If I export a PDF and then print it, that works fine – because the PDF doesn’t have the ghosts. (But of course I don’t want to have to go through this extra step each time.)
There was another user who reported a similar problem not so long ago, and I wasn’t able to reproduce it. I think there must be some variability in printer support across different manufacturers and models.
Just for reference, in both paint .net and Photoshop I added some text and some lines to a document, and then I put a box over them with a black fill at 0 opacity. When I printed this, there was no trace of the box.
