Trouble with exported PDFs in Big Sur

Is anyone else having difficulty with PDFs? I create scores for students, and I often hear that a PDF that I sent them won’t open, or is incomplete, or has blank pages, even though the files opens perfectly and looks and prints fine on my machine. I thought it might be a Preview problem, as I often combine scores into a single file. Folks on the Apple forums have not found similar problems. It is usually Windows users who are having difficulty with the files.

I’m looking to see if it might be a font issue. I just used the Validate Fonts feature built into Font Book in MacOS and I got an error for the Bravura font (see image). Is there a place where we can download the standalone Bravura font family?

Thanks for your patience as I walk through this. I was able to download the BravuraText.otf file from here:

After deleting the old version and installing the new version via Font Book, I no longer get the error when I validate the font.

I don’t know if this will fix the PDF issue, but hopefully…

I am now on Big Sur on an M1 machine and I don’t seem to be having any problems. I have noticed, however, that depending on the provenance of a pdf file, some readers will open and display correctly, and others won’t (I speak now of non-dorico PDFs). I wonder if their chosen pdf viewer has anything to do with it?

I have a pdf of music from another publisher that includes square note notation embedded as a ‘regular’ font. The font wasn’t properly baked into the pdf, and so Preview only shows me garbledygook but Acrobat displays it all correctly.

I do wish to reiterate, however, that I’ve never had any issues with my dorico scores.

On the assumption that something is odd with your installation of dorico, (considering bravura was out of sorts,) have you done a fresh install of the latest version of dorico?