Countermelody

A few drawbacks to PDFs

Although PDF files can be very useful in electronic music distribution, I feel that it’s necessary to point out some of their flaws as well. Besides, future topics should be more interesting if I haven’t already claimed that one type of production is completely superior to all others.

• There is very little control. Instead of making it possible only to print directly from a website, perhaps with a cap on the number of copies, a PDF can always be downloaded onto the user’s computer and then printed at will. (Then again, no matter how people get their music, they will have access to a photocopier.)
• What You See Is Usually What You Get. Almost always, I’d say. However, when taking “finished” PDF versions to FedEx Kinko’s to print large scores and booklet formats, I was occasionally irritated by an error in one of the percussion articulations (the center slash of a roll marking was hollow).* This was the one anomalous case I ever noticed that was specific to PDF, but there’s the chance of other bugs.
• The purchaser cannot transpose, etc. If you are writing vocal songs or works for unspecified solo instrument, programs like Sibelius/Scorch can allow people an important degree of customization. A PDF reader just can’t.
• There is no playback. Definitely a liability with music, and it needs to be addressed by other means.
• They look really bad on the screen. Just… print it. It’ll be better then. 600 dpi seems to work well as a print resolution. I used to include warnings about this problem in every email.

Other production techniques overcome many of these issues—to be considered later—but they always mean a substantial increase in cost, which it is crucial to minimize wherever possible in self-publishing.

*MakeMusic has since owned up to the problem and released a patch that, among other things, “updates the Maestro font’s unmeasured tremolo character so that it displays correctly when printed with a PostScript printer.” The same fix was also bundled into the Finale 2007c Updater. It took a fair bit of digging to verify, but this correction corresponds time-wise to a post that describes my problem precisely, here.