Text style changes when exporting

Hello folks,

I just encountered a strange thing when trying the “export” function in Dorico 3.5. I haven’t used this before (I am since long used to a pdf printer that I have installed on the computer). For some parts, all texts including chord symbols are made italic in the pdf. First is the print preview in Dorico, second is the same area when displayed as pdf in Adobe Acrobat.


Export was done with these settings
image
Even more mysterious is that when exporting all 17 parts in one operation, only 7 had this problem:
Saxes: Sopr sax and alto sax erronous, tenor 1, tenor 2 and baryton sax ok.
4 trumpets: all erroneous
4 trombones: all ok
Rhythm section: guitar erroneous, pi, bass and drums ok

See Question about Fonts on Mac OS 10.15.5 (Catalina) - #2 by pianoleo

I use PC, not Mac.

Anyway, the chord symbols (for instance) looks fine in other parts, e. g. piano. They should be in the same font, right? Anyway I haven’t changed it just for one part…

Here is how it looks in the pdf version of the piano part:
image
Also note that e. g. rehearsal marks are not italics here.

The underlying reason will be exactly the same though: there is a font in use somewhere in those parts that doesn’t have an italicised variant, and Dorico is synthesising an italic variant within Dorico, but it’s getting borked on the way out to PDF (because it can’t actually be embedded in the file, because it doesn’t exist).

Now I don’t understand at all. I have stated clear examples that Dorico treats texts with identical (really identical) fonts in different ways for different parts. Are you saying that this is as it should be and there is nothing that can be done to avoid it?

No, you’ve given a few bars of information - there are at least 156 bars that I can’t see. There will be something somewhere in those parts that’s different. I haven’t the foggiest idea where.

Well I don’t either. But you mean that the problem is on my side and I need to go through all texts and look for…what exactly?

When you load the file, what does the Missing Fonts dialog tell you? If it doesn’t show at all, have you perhaps turned it off in Preferences?

Somewhere you’re using italics from a font that doesn’t have an italic style. Generally speaking it’s Petaluma and it’s bar numbers, but in your case it may be something else. If you can upload a page of one of the good PDFs and a page of one of the bad PDFs (export a single page, or cut down the actual PDF; an image is no good) then someone might be able to dig into the font list and find the difference.

I tried to print out the faulty pages via my pdf writer, and they came out fine with no errors.

But your answers are very confusing so I get curious. I have never seen a Missing Fonts dialog, and as far as I know I haven’t turned it off. Where can I see this? I looked through all menus in the “Preferences” window, but haven’t found it so far. Please guide me here.

It’s down near the bottom of the General page of Preferences - “Warn when projects use fonts not installed on this computer”.

The reason they come out fine via your pdf writer is that Dorico is basically spooling images to the pdf writer, whereas exported PDFs (via Dorico’s Graphics Export) actually embed fonts. Aside from the fact your pdf writer might be messing with the margins, it’s likely to generate larger files that are actually lower quality when printed.

Here are my settings. I haven’t changed anything as far as I know.

It’s decidedly odd that the Missing Fonts Dialog hasn’t been complaining about this file. I’m not quite sure where to point you next.

Actually, no it’s not - this is Windows specific.

It’s likely to be the same problem, though…

Well, as far as I can read, you are saying that Dorico treats my parts differently by design and that I have made something wrong in how I have prepared my music? And if I do not love that the text style has changed in some parts, then I need to find the errors in my file? So again, when going through these 7 parts, what should I look for? Should I look in the score or in the parts in Engrave mode?

Follow that thread I just linked to. You really need to ensure that none of your Text Styles or Paragraph Styles (or any Staff Text, System Text or Text Frames that you’ve styled manually) are using Petaluma Italic. The obvious things are bar numbers and dynamic text.

Well, I now went through the guitar part, from which the first excerpts were taken, and I have double clicked all texts in it (except for predefined texts such as “cresc”, “dim”, rehearsal letters, bar numbers and chord symbols that all parts have). All say “Petaluma script”, “Regular”. And btw there is nothing added textwise to the guitar part that does not exist in the piano, bass or drum part. No text have been altered style-wise either.

Yes, but the bar numbers and the dynamics will be defined in Engrave > Paragraph Styles and Engrave > Font Styles and I’m betting at least one of them is set to Petaluma Script Italic (and it looks like it’s probably both of them).

Frankly my surprise is that any of the parts have come out correctly, rather than that some of them have come out incorrectly. It stands to reason that they should all have problems.

Ok, anyway I haven’t changed those settings. What I did was to change the general font to Petaluma, and then obviously measure numbers and dynamics were set to what they are not (I guess from the Dorico template). Are you saying that if the font is changed to Petaluma, then export to pdf is not supported?

Yes. As Daniel said in the thread I linked to above: