Feh.

[rhu]

The lyric syllabification for the counterpoint on this movement is giving me conniptions. So I'm going to post it as a work-in-progress and walk away for a few days.

ETA: Finale 2009 doesn't seem to be able to print anything to my PDF driver. So tonight is scoreless. I am very frustrated.

ETA: Hah! Take that, Finale! Open the Graphics tool; export all pages as EPS; then use Adobe® Acrobat® Distiller® to convert them to individual PDFs, then use Acrobat Pro to combine them into one PDF. (This is not a good long-term solution, but it gets the score up tonight.)

PDF score and MP3 of "Shiru Lashem Shir Chadash", "Sing unto God a New Song". Psalm mid-90s, with a chance of thunderstorms.

Comments

[abbasegal.livejournal.com]

Don't you mean to say that you used Adobe® Acrobat® Pro to combine the files into one PDF?

;-)

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

You only need to indicate trademarks on first use.

[toonhead-npl.livejournal.com]

Wait, you mean on the Mac? Why aren't you using Apple's built-in PDF driver? As long as it's got a Print dialog, you can always make a PDF from it.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

The problem was with Finale, not the PDF driver. Finale seemed to have the page size completely screwed up. When I told it to print with crop marks, I got the southeast crop mark in the middle of the west edge of the page, and otherwise ten empty pages.

Using Distiller was a workaround, since EPS export was working properly.

Later that evening, I found that changing the page size from letter to legal and back again cleared up the problem.

[toonhead-npl.livejournal.com]

Hope I'm not asking dumb questions, but this is after you set up and saved a printing preset with the correct page size, etc.?

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Um, set up and saved a what? I haven't had to do that for any other programs. This is Mac, isn't it supposed to just work?

As I said to La Do Ti last night on IM, as she graciously helped me --- helping people with Finale is part of her job, so it was nice of her to help me as a friend --- I've turned into the dreaded "stupid user". I didn't even know if I was running "Leopard" or not. Turns out that's 10.5, and I am.

[toonhead-npl.livejournal.com]

I wish people would stop saying that. It's a piece of equipment, not a magic box that can read minds and predict any and all situations. Grr.

First go into your System Preferences and choose "Print & Fax." There you can add your specific printer model with defaults if it's not already listed at the left side of the window. The default page setup listed here is for your system, so if you want to print tabloid sized pages for just Finale but letter sized for everything else, leave this set to letter.

Then in Finale, choose "Page Setup..." from the File menu and plug in the default page size you want to use for Finale.

Now o print something from Finale to call up the Print dialog. Choose your printer from the "Printer" dropdown choices that appear at the top.

Skip the "Presets" option for now and below that should be another dropdown with other choices like Layout, etc. You can probably skip this but take a look at the choices if any may apply to you.

Now choose the dropdown for Presets and select "Save As..." to name and save the new set of defaults you've created specifically for Finale. Anytime you print, choose this under Presets (if it's not already selected in Finale by default from now on) and see if it works.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I said "it's supposed to just work" mostly to be ironic. One of the reasons I decided to give the Mac a try was to see whether all the people who gush about how "it just works" were right.

On the other hand, I honestly don't understand why something as common as printing wasn't set up with a reasonable default, where "reasonable" means "I don't get blank pages". And I have printed (with varying degrees of success) from other applications, so I'm perfectly willing to believe that this was Finale using some setting that the other apps hadn't, but it's still surprising to me that it failed in this way. If there are no reasonable defaults, then at least pop up a dialog the first time I try to print saying "Oh, you haven't set up your page size yet" and then the instructions you just gave me.

Given Apple's reputation for making things easy, I find the frustration I had last night baffling.

Thanks for your patience and for the information.

[toonhead-npl.livejournal.com]

Well you don't normally have to do all that for most apps, but if you have a finicky one that seems to be doing something funky at print time, then you have to try going the long way.