PDF produced by Sibelius is displayed correctly, but prints badly, an unacceptable disparity
I am using MacOS Big Sur 11.6 and Acrobat Acrobat version 2021.007.20099.
The attached "Ful Score" PDF is displayed properly on the screen by Acrobat, but Acrobat prints it badly. I also included two screenshots, a *.png of Acrobat's display of the PDF (which looks OK) and a pdf produced by scanning a physical printout of that same PDF printed by Acrobat, which shows that Acrobat prints the file really badly.
The PDF was produced by Sibelius. I might say Sibelius was at fault for producing a bad PDF (probably with layers, but I'm not sure of the internals), except for one important fact:
The latest version of Acrobat displays it correctly and prints it badly. That disparity means you can't trust Acrobat to show you on the screen how it will print. That's really bad news. It means the software is lying to the user, who won't find out until after it is printed. Or even worse, until a customer on whose website you posted the file (because it looked fine in Acrobat) tries to print it and goes berserk -- lawsuits or other kinds of attacks are inevitable.
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Guy Story commented
It is sad and frustrating. Apple Preview (and Google Chrome and my iPhone) can print the file correctly without first saving to PDF to "heal" the file, so there are Adobe libraries in use that do the right thing. It has taken literally hours on chat and phone to get to this point, and nobody at Adobe was able to discover that it was a known bug. REALLY SAD.
Have you pointed out the multiple fonts problem to Avid?
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David G Grubbs commented
No one is working on it because there are at least *two* bugs, at least one in Acrobat and at least one in Sibelius. When I contacted them, they each answered with some combination of "Not our problem -- get the other company to fix it" and, infuriatingly, "We have no responsibility for training users to use our software." That last reaction indicates a serious disdain for their customers.
The Sibelius bug is that they insert multiple copies of fonts into their PDFs. This can be fixed up by finding a PDF reader that can read the PDF and also allows a "Save as PDF" while reading a PDF. I think Apple's "Preview" can do that, but if whatever tool you find will rewrite the PDF without the multiple copies of the fonts, then the copy of the PDF has been "healed".
The Adobe bug is that Acrobat is too damned strict. Since other tools can read the mildly-non-standard Sibelius PDFs, Acrobat has no excuse for not reading them too. If an Adobe tool detects a non-standard PDF, it should show a warning and then try its best to understand what's there. Instead, Acrobat produces a printout of the music PDF produced by Sibelius that lacks all the noteheads -- completely worthless.
And instead of responding to the report of the error with a testing plan and a request for example PDFs that show the error, Adobe decided to throw abuse in the face of the customer. Sad.
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Guy Story commented
I have the same problem. Is Adobe working on it?
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Gordon Sheard commented
I'm having the same problem.