Apropos of the recent discussion of the poor quality of screen display for PDFs produced from Finale on Windows machines, I can offer a bit of information that hopefully will shed a little light on the matter.
I use pdfFactory Pro to produce PDFs, which installs as a printer driver in Windows (XP Pro in my case). I'm on Finale 2004a (and will continue to be until they fix the hidden note accidental positioning bug introduced in 2004b), and have been disappointed for some time by the poor screen display of Finale PDFs, which of course print out just fine. What bugged me the most was that staff line were different thicknesses when viewed at any magnification below 400%. Today I found that I if set the resolution in pdfFactory (on the "Metrics" tab under "Printer Preferences") to the default 300 dpi instead of 1200 dpi, staff lines then looked consistent at all magnifications. I had originally set it to 1200 dpi because I was printing to a 1200 dpi printer, not an unreasonable assumption. I haven't completely examined the effect on other fine details, but I can say that things like slanted beams are smooth at high magnification and print out smoothly, so they're definitely not at 300 dpi. Besides, I was most interested in getting something to look decent on screen, and if I have to make a higher-res PDF for print-out, no big deal. Does this make sense to somebody who knows more about Postscript than I do? Lee Actor Composer-in-Residence and Assistant Conductor, Palo Alto Philharmonic _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
