Font display problem in Adobe Illustrator...

Hello!

I am a new to this forum, I use ENCORE music notation software to print out my musical arrangements, the software uses a music font called: “Anastasia” to design the overall music notation symbols. But, whn I importe PDF files of my msic into Illustrator the music font substitutes its musical symboles for blank missing character boxes yet in the glyph box, all characters are present. Let me explain more:

I often export Encore music notation scores to PDF or PostScript via the Mac OS X print dialog.

Basically this works fine:


– Exported PDFs show a clear thumbnail preview in the Mac Finder.

– They display and print perfectly in Apple’s Preview application and in Adobe Acrobat.

– Due to automatic font embedding, they display and print even on remote computers (where the viewer doesn’t have Encore’s Anastasia font installed.)

– After exporting a score to PostScript I can open the PostScript in Preview and Acrobat. They successfully convert the file to PDF and display it perfectly!
However I find myself in a peculiar pinch when I import these PDFs or PostScript files to Adobe Illustrator. One of the two following situations occurs:

– the text and title elements render in Anastasia (happens with imported PostScript files)

– the notes (and other score objects) fail to use Anastasia. (Happens with imported PDF)
Here’s a screen shot of an Encore score, which looks perfect in Preview after exporting to PDF is:

… but it looks like this when I open it in Illustrator. All ‘note objects’ fail to use Anastasia:

Does the font need a special font mapping to display right in Adobe Illustrator? Thank you.

From what I understand you have both software and a font from ENCORE, and you export it through a PDF driver to generate a PDF file. Then it does not correctly show in Adobe Illustrator. I’m not sure what FontCreator has to do with it, but we’ll see.

Too many things can go wrong, but my first guess is ENCORE uses ASCII characters to display the notes, while the font is a symbol font. Symbol fonts use specif non-ASCII codepoints. Are you using the latest versions of the ENCORE music notation software, Adobe Illustrator, and the PDF driver? What did ENCORE say about this issue?

I found the following items on the web. I do not know if this all relates to the same font as in the question.

http://www.theoreticallycorrect.com/Music-Notation-Software/Music-Notation-Fonts/Anastasia-font/index.html


http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc/music.html

http://anaigeon.free.fr/parts_pols_pc.html

The above page supplies a link for downloading an Anastasia font, which may or may not be the original font in the question.

I looked at the Format Settings… General Font embedding panel and found that a Reserved flag was checked. I do not understand what the checking of that flag means.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encore_(software)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport_Designs_Inc.


I hope that this helps.

William Overington

5 December 2008