NOTATIO

I posted this on the Finale forum, as I think it is probably most relevant there, but then I thought it may be of interest here.

The attachments show how it should have come back from the printer and (with my added red arrows) how it did.

Everything else in the 247 page 1,317 bar score, including a little non-standard notation, seems to have come back as it should, but the hard space followed by hard hyphen appeared with this quasi exclamation mark intruding. The solution appears to be to save the file as a postscript (.ps) and then open it in Apple Preview (or Adobe Acrobat) and re-save ('re-distill') it as a PDF. The original file was 6 MB (much of which is the cover picture), the .ps was 55 MB, which when re-saved as .pdf becomes 35 MB.

Hard hyphens in the score which are directly after a word look fine, so I'm guessing that it's the hard space that is causing the problem.

The whole piece (the original 6 MB PDF file) prints OK on my domestic ink jet printer.

Have others encountered this sort of thing?

Can you attach a .mus file of that measure(s)?

Here is my attempt to attach five bars of the .musx file which happen to contain the three (I think the only three) instances of what we are discussing.

(I deleted what preceded and followed this excerpt then made some small adjustments so it appeared half-way coherent).

In my PDF it is displayed correctly. Maybe it is a font problem?

But I wonder if you need to include the hyphen in the score, to me it looks as misplaced extension line. (No my conclusion here).
Or insert it maybe directly after the word without non-br space?

Here is PDF attached.

Thank you.

I was trying to reproduce the punctuation in the libretto at that point (see the screenshot).

BTW, I see some articulations have moved in the viola in your PDF, but maybe that's what happens when a Finale 26 file is opened in Finale 25.

Anyway, if making it postscript and then re-saving it as a PDF does solve this, it may be the safest answer, despite the rather large file that seems to result (a nuisance but not a major problem). I think it depends on who is doing the printing. A specialist music printer often does that sort of thing their end, but what with Covid and the utterly appalling absurdity of Brexit (eg music from Germany being held by UK customs for weeks or lost altogether) the currently available choice is not what it might be. The printers who did this are very good (and also both quick and cheap) and extremely helpful, but it will be best if I do all the preliminaries and check everything.

So your PDFs sent to the printer looked fine, but the actual print ended up with the problem? It's almost certainly some kind of font encoding issue, which the printer's prepress RIP is having trouble with. Rinsing through PostScript still fixes many problems, as it has fewer parameters and options for how things can be represented.

Can you supply a sample PDF, as you sent it to the printer? Which version of Finale was this?

I can recommend Halstan for UK music printing. They can be a bit slow: 10 day turnaround, but the quality is good.

Thank you. (For the info of others on the forum Ben & I have been in private message contact. I provided him with a link to the full PDF file, he can see nothing wrong with the fonts, but he has come up with a suggestion which I'm going to try.)

I've just made contact with Halston UK and expect to be talking to them at greater length tomorrow. They have been specialist music printers for over 100 years. They are not the cheapest, but may be worth the expense.

Does the hyphen after "me" in the libretto mean that the speaker (singer) breaks off? If so, it would seem in conflict with the length of the note, which would explain why the conjunction of the two symbols appears strange.

Not exactly. However, she might end the note abruptly instead of with a slight diminuendo. It's open to interpretation, but if it is not quite ‘normal’ (whatever that is) that might not be a bad thing. She (the stage character) is nervous and uncertain. The tempo is very slow: crotchet (quarter) = 40 and there is the opportunity for considerable rubato.

When I've used similar notation in the past it seems to have been interpreted effectively.

Or to put it more precisely: at the end of the long note on “me”, but not before, the singer seems to have a sudden doubt.