On 4 Jul 2002, at 12:48, Rocky Road wrote:

> And so it came to pass that David W. Fenton spake:
> >  > At 12:47 PM 06/27/02, David W. Fenton wrote:
> >>   >What I need is advice on
> >>   >how to help her export the musical examples to EPS files that will embed
> >>   >in MS Word 2000 documents that can be sent to the printer and be 
> >>portable.
> >>
> >>  I'm sure you will get lots of different answers to this. . . .
> >
> >I actually didn't get much in the way of answers at all.
> 
> In FInale, choose the graphics tool. Then choose "export pages" from 
> the graphics menu.
> 
> If you only want small musical examples rather than the whole page, 
> double click and then drag a selection, then choose "export 
> selection".
> 
> To be safe, include fonts. I include a Pict preview too I think
> 
> In Word (I have Word98), you choose: "Insert" -> "Picture" -> "From 
> File". Choose the saved EPS file and there it is.

Well, this illustrates perfectly the problem with my post. I guess I 
didn't word it well.

The platform is PC for Finale and Word, where the documents to go to the 
PROFESSIONAL GRAPHIC DESIGNER are produced. The PC user producing the 
documents has an HP LaserJet 2100M (i.e., PostScript), but she normally 
uses it in PCL mode (which is substantially faster; perhaps PS would be 
faster if we added memory, but PS is not really needed for most of her 
work; I don't even know why she spent the extra money to get the 2100M 
instead of just the 2100).

The problem is not at all that we don't know how to export EPS files -- 
that's completely trivial. The question I asked was in reference to all 
the problems I've heard about the PostScript that Finale produces being 
non-portable unless you do special tweaks. I assumed that the problems 
with the PS export would also be present in the EPS production (perhaps 
wrongly).

I have received a number of private responses, but all of them are from 
Mac users, and one correspondent said EPS works fine on Mac and doesn't 
work at all on Windows. 

I honestly don't believe the latter could possibly be true when the PC 
where the EPS is being produced has a PS printer attached. If it were 
true, then there would be a major area where Coda has failed in providing 
feature parity, and I have a hard time believing they'd let that happen.

I asked about the pitfalls of producing the EPS files (though I admit I 
didn't mention that it was Windows). So far, I'm pretty sure these things 
are important to insure that it works:

1. Finale has to have been installed with the PS printer set as the 
default. If it was not, then the PS fonts would not have been installed.

2. The files for export have to be produced using the PS versions of the 
fonts. I've got a PS printer and I've had significant problems with the 
different font names (TT vs. PS), and I've never actually gotten PS 
printing to work reliably (but I have a much older version of Finale than 
the person for whom I'm asking this question).

3. At EPS export time, the active printer for the document must be the PS 
printer.

What else has to be done? I just set everything up appropriately on my 
system, and even thought the Word print preview is obviously showing only 
the TIFF preview, the file prints out as PS, but the fonts are completely 
wrong. Printing from Finale (with PS fonts to the PS printer) works just 
fine, even though I've often had great difficulty with that. Of course, 
my version of Finale is very old (97; Word is only 97, too), so things 
may be better in later version.

I guess my only option is to try it out on the person's system and see 
what happens, then come back and ask questions.

I know that EPS is the right format for this, as that's going to be best 
for production print work with a professional graphic designer. I'd like 
all of this to be done at a professional level. Obviously, if we can't 
work it out, we can fall back to the TIFFs. I generally don't use those 
directly in Word, but instead export the TIFF at very high resolution (as 
high as the destination printer), then use my graphics editor to up the 
color depth to the maximum, then resample to a smaller size to save as a 
GIF, and then import that into Word. Word does an excellent job of re-
rasterizing embedded graphics (it has intelligent resampling that doesn't 
lose very thin lines or badly anti-alias them, at least not until you 
make the graphic very, very small).

In this case, we'd be sending the designer the GIFs embedded in the Word 
file, but would also send the raw TIFFs so the designer could use the raw 
source images in the actual production work. It would probably work OK, 
but it would certainly be more work than with the EPS option, and it will 
be costing the journal more hours of the designer's work that has to be 
paid for, especially in this issue, where there are lots of very small 
musical examples in one of the articles.

So, if we can make EPS work, then that is far, far preferrable.

Again, I don't want to sound ungrateful for the advice, but so far most 
of what I've heard is Mac users saying "Works great for me!" or Windows 
users saying "Can't be done!" Neither really helps much, even if they  
both represent people's real experiences.

-- 
David W. Fenton                         |        http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
David Fenton Associates                 |        http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc
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