At 10:57 PM 1/18/05 +0100, d. collins wrote: >I'm about ready to throw in the Finale towel and switch to Sibelius! I >can't get Finale to produce decent PDF files: not only do they look >terrible on screen, with staff (and other) lines of different thicknesses, >but I just noticed they print out the same way on a HP Laserjet (non >postscript).
I've been reading along, because I need to produce decent PDF files as well. I gave up with the on-screen presentation several Finales ago. It looks terrible at screen size. My printouts are very good. Still, they never match the Finale direct printouts. I really don't know the machinations of Postscript with regard to graphics, and it's only the Finale graphics that seem the problem -- beams, stems, staff lines, slurs, etc. The fonts are fine. By increasing the resolution at which the original document is 'printed' to file, I can get close to the results of a direct print from Finale. But there are so many variables in the chain (at least five setup screens: Finale page setup, the virtual Postscript printer dialog, Finale print dialog, Distiller setup, Acrobat reader print dialog) that it is a constant source of botched results if I forget to use a preset I've made. I have Xerox and Brother laser printers and two HP inkjet printers, and also bring files to the local Mailboxes Etc, which has a large laser unit. The results of Finale graphics from printer to printer are never the same. I simply can't trust Finale's output. This is all a Finale-specific issue, isn't it? I do book editing and design, and have done several books from Pagemaker (and even one from MSWord) for on-demand book printing, and what I expect to have printed is exactly what I get -- an important factor if the printer is half a continent away and we're about to do a run of 1,000 books. I produce newsletters, posters, booklets and magazines, and copy-edit publications for which I get PDF galleys. PDF results even from a multi-layered original in $60 worth of Paint Shop Pro are perfect -- fonts, vector graphics, and all. I never have trouble producing printer-ready PDFs except with Finale. Does anyone have a factual explanation for this beyond, say, programming incompetence over the past decade or so? I can't imagine that producing Finale output is more complicated than, say, a roadmap with symbols, raster and vector graphics, shadowing, and text rendered as a flat map for proofing and as four CMYK plates for printing. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
