On Apr 26, 2006, at 9:13 AM, Kim Patrick Clow wrote:
I know someone who uses Sibelius and they sent me a PDF of a file.
Instantly the minute the PDF opened on my screen, the quality
was noticeably better than any PDF I have created with Finale.
Are there some settings that I don't know about to make the absolutely
sharpest, clearest PDF possible. Or is something that Finale doesn't
handle well? For example online there is this:
http://www.utorpheus.com/misc/pagine_musica/tib011.pdf and I've
posted a screenshot of my friend's Sibelius PDF at
http://www.bytenet.net/kpclow/finale/sample-sib.bmp
Here's a sample of my PDF @
http://www.bytenet.net/kpclow/finale/sample.pdf I used the highest
setting possible (Printer's quality) and I upped the DPI to 2400.
Still not as good as this Molter sample, or the Sibelius. My beams
seem very ragged, no matter how much you zoom in. And I noticed that
Finale's staff lines seem too thick. And some of the articulations and
words have a splotchy look.
This is very frustrating for me. Any advice would be greatly
appreciated.
There are a few inconsistencies here.
In your sample.pdf I saw no words or articulations at all, so I
couldn't comment. But everything else, including lines, beams, slurs,
and bar numbers, stayed nice and smooth right up to the highest zoom,
as it should. PDFs are supposed to NOT use bitmaps, which get jaggy at
high zoom; they are supposed to use little equations to draw lines and
so do not lose resolution no matter how they are resized. I did notice
that the stems on flagged eighths seem to have alignment issues with
the flag, and you have not corrected Finale's mistreatment of slanted
beams so there are little white wedges with staff lines (Patterson
Beams plugin corrects this last one) but everything else is fine. Are
you sure this is a PDF issue, and not a screen viewing issue on your
computer? Compare printouts of your PDF files with printouts of the
original Finale file to be sure you are comparing apples to apples.
Antialiasing can put little grey borders around curved objects on
screen which could account for the splotchy look you mention, but that
doesn't print out usually.
(One thing that doesn't concern you, but Apple's Preview app shows
lines and beams in your file as grey instead of black onscreen. They
show up correctly in Adobe Reader 7, so it is obviously a Preview
issue. I see this all the time with Finale PDFs viewed in Preview that
come from PC computers.)
Your friend's sample-sib.bmp IS a bitmap, and so automatically gets
jaggy when zoomed. Just on screen, I saw some bad stem-notehead
connections and the right-most barline appears badly aligned, though
that could be cropping. I would have to see the original PDF to make a
proper comparison.
The tib011.pdf looks fine - no flag end issues and hardly any slanted
beams so I couldn't comment on the wedges. He seems to have set his
barlines to be about twice as thick as his stems and staff lines, which
doesn't seem to be consistent with publication practice. I don't know
as much about this, but I think the usual idea is to have stems thinner
than barlines, which are in turn thinner than staff lines by a small
amount, though I see a lot of different opinions on this.
If you don't like your line thicknesses, they are easy to set in
Document Options>Lines. I notice your stems, staff lines and barlines
all seem to be set the same, which I think is the Finale default, but
they are easy to change. I find good-looking line thickness depends on
the size of staff you are using, so I hesitate to offer any exact
suggestions since you are almost certainly using different staff
heights than I am.
Christopher
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