OSX - Print high quality PDFs damn you! And do it cheaply...

Trentus

Hey guys,

So I've been doing a bit of transcribing/arranging lately (nothing professional or anything), and whenever I try to export my work as a PDF (with OSX's built in tool) I end up with horrible looking documents. Stave lines and note stems of inconsistent widths, jagged (de)crescendos slurs... it's not pretty.

I've been managing lately by booting up an instance of windows and printing the things with CutePDF, and it's been doing a pretty decent job. It's not quite as crisp as I'd like, but it's worlds better than what OSX was giving me. I'd rather not have to go through this process though and, ideally, I'd like what I see in Sibelius to be what I see in the final document.

So (and I know I'm asking a lot here and very much expect the answer to be "no"), does anyone know of a cheap high quality PDF printer for OSX which won't take up a solid gigabyte or so of HD space?

Thanks guys!

Edit, but not really an edit: While I was writing this post I installed and tested CUPS-PDF. It does a pretty decent job, nearly as good as what I get with CutePDF. I'll have to poke around the config file and see if I can improve this.

ZackSchilling

When you print from Mac OS X, do you get a disaster? Because the PDFs it makes should be identical to printed output.

If printed stuff looks fine, the program is trying to help write the PDF and doing a terrible job. To get around this, go to the save as PDF button in the print dialog like usual, but save a Postscript file instead. Open the resulting file in Preview and resave as PDF. That should fix it for you.

Trentus

Err, as in print to a physical printer? I have no idea... I don't really have access to a printer.

ZackSchilling

I edited my post with something you can try without a physical printer.

Trentus

Ah, there's definitely an improvement there. It's on par with what I get from CUPS-PDF, however it's still not quite as clear as what I see in the app.

Edit: Here's what I see, the top being the post script export, the bottom being in app. I'm unsure why there are spacing differences. Might have to look into that.

ZackSchilling

Trentus wrote: »

Ah, there's definitely an improvement there. It's on par with what I get from CUPS-PDF, however it's still not quite as clear as what I see in the app.

Are you sure it's not just the reader blurring or poorly rendering the thing? Have you tried a different reader (Acrobat, Foxit) or just zooming in? If it still isn't good enough, I don't know what to say. That might be as good of output as the program can do. Alternatively, I think it can export images. You can play around with that, maybe even open a set of images all at once in preview, hit print, and save that as a PDF.

ZackSchilling

Trentus wrote: »

Those two are exactly the same. There are miniscule rendering differences and the PDF is rendering a tiny bit larger than the program, but the spacing, relatively speaking, is identical.

I scaled up the program to match the PDF. It's the same.

Trentus

Well, if that's as good as it gets then I can't be too picky about it I guess (although, as you mentioned, I could use insanely high res tiffs or something... not too practical for me though). At least now I know it was Sibelius screwing up the PDF writing.

Thanks for your help man.

Vater5B

Man, I think it's ten times easier just exporting PNGs from Sibelius and then dragging and dropping it into Pages or Word and saving as a PDF. I can make sure the PDFs look right that way.