SVG and PNG graphics export at or close to 100% scale depending on desired DPI. However, TIFFs seem to export at 96% (this holds true for graphic slices in Engrave mode or entire pages in Print mode).
Is there an explanation for this? The solution for now seems to resample these graphics in an image editor such as Photoshop to achieve the desired size and DPI, but I’d love to see this extra step removed if possible.
Yes, I can confirm: at 72dpi, the pixel count is 594 x 841 - 1 pixel off A4 on each side.
At 150dpi, it’s 1188 x 1682, which is 2 pixels short on each side.
At 1200dpi, it’s 9504 x 13456, which is short by 412 pixels.
Upscaling a bitmap is going make it more blurry and pixelated - Probably better to export as a PDF and then convert to a bitmap, if you have to use bitmaps at all.
Any reason you’re not using vectors?
Ah, the vector question is a good one but I’m afraid the answer to that is another graphic export issue — certain third-party fonts won’t embed into SVG graphics from Dorico properly (if I recall from some years ago, this was a Qt framework issue not easily or perhaps at all solvable by Steinberg). Since I primarily use third-party music fonts, this one’s a no-go for me.
Why not PDF then?
(Sorry, having worked on both sides of print production at publishers and printers, I’m curious about people’s workflows!)
Thanks for reporting this. The problem is one of incorrect truncation: when Dorico calculates the scale factor that determines the output size of the graphic, it’s truncating a floating point value to an integer, and that’s resulting in a slightly smaller graphic than intended. I’ll make sure this gets fixed.
What I do is export the slice as a PDF, then I use cloud convert to convert it to SVG with curves. That preserves all of the information regardless of font.
What do you do with an SVG that you can’t with a PDF?
There was some version of Word previously that wouldn’t import PDFs, so I started doing SVGs. Word 364 does PDFs now, though.
The main point of the conversion is “convert to curves.”
There are ways to outline (convert to curves) the fonts in a PDF. The increasingly rare problems with importing PDFs into Affinity are fixed by outlining; though otherwise, embedded fonts should cause no problems.
With regard to workflow, as music librarians we often have to engrave corrected or altered materials and insert them into existing materials, which are often scans, and in general Photoshop is the tool of choice here.
It is possible to use Acrobat to copy and paste all the individual objects as vectors or text objects from one PDF to another, but as a workflow this means erasing music in Photoshop and then adding the music in Acrobat, rather than doing it all in Photoshop. Slightly skewed music also becomes more visually apparent with an engraved insert, so often one immediately corrects skew in Photoshop of a scan when an insert is involved that might previously have been overlookable. There are some who do the erasing in Acrobat via the Redact tool, but since the selection is restricted to rectangles this often isn’t precise enough in tightly spaced music.
I’ll plead ignorance on the finer nuances between TIFF vs. PNG, but many librarians scan directly to TIFF and edit individual pages this way, bypassing PDF entirely until the final product is assembled.
Ah, if you’re patching a scanned document, then you’re already working with a bitmap that’s not the same quality as a fresh PDF anyway; fair enough!
Yes, and with opera especially I assure you it’s often much, much worse 