trumpeter wrote:Two weeks and no acknowledgment of the problems from Notion. That's disappointing. I would like to see Notion develop into professional software. Printing all of the barlines and repeat marks is essential!
As does
all computer software, Notion 3 has some eccentric behaviors, but the important thing from my perspective is being able to devise a "workaround", which in some instances takes a while, but so what . . .
So what! For reference, my university training is in Computer Science and Mathematics, and the reason I underlined "all" is based on the work of Alonzo Church, Kurt Friedrich Gödel, and Alan Turing, where the short version is found in Alan Turing's "Halting Problem" . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problemAnother way to understand the general principle is in terms of convergence, where for example most folks think that if one fairly tosses a coin enough times, then eventually there will be 50 percent heads and 50 percent tails, but this is
not what happens, because the series never converges . . .
Regarding the printing problem you have encountered, there are several things that might provide a practical solution, although there is no much I can do to help at present, because I am not entirely certain about some of the music terminology or whether the PDF file I generated on the Mac had everything that is supposed to be present . . .
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NOTE: This is the PDF that I created from the Notion 3 example score that you posted earlier . . . ]
http://www.surfwhammys.com/GonnaFlyNow-N3.pdfThis is the information you provided in your original post:
* A few invisible barlines (these are repeat marks but no barline at all is visible) in some parts only. Alto Sax 1, 8th of E.
I do not see this in the PDF that I generated on the Mac with the page size set properly . . .
* First page of score is moved partially off the page by the title and cannot be moved back up.
I do not see this in the PDF that I generated on the Mac with the page size set properly . . .
* First time bar/second time bar in Baritone part is a mess!
I do not see this in the PDF that I generated on the Mac with the page size set properly . . .
* First trumpet part sample doesn't include the highest note. I can play it... why can't Notion? I should add that the jazz sounds aren't working here for some reason, so I've had to select the basic orchestral ones.
This is a different problem that has nothing to do with printing, and it is something that happens with VSTi sound libraries, so while in an Utopian world every VSTi sound library will have instrument samples that do everything, the realities are different . . .
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NOTE: If you are referring to the Notion 3 Jazz Expansion Sounds, then this is easily remedied by putting the various Jazz Expansion Sounds in the correct folder, which will be the folder for sounds that has the "N2" and "Bundled" subfolders, which will be specific to the operating system platform, but on the Mac will be under the "Sounds" folder. You might need to set the Sounds folder in Notion 3 Preferences, but probably only if you installed the various sounds to a different location. Depending on how frequently you install new software, on the Mac you might need to clear some caches or whatever, which causes applications to rescan for sounds, but this is not difficult to do most of the time, although occasionally there will be a DEMO version of something that is difficult to remove, which currently is the case with the DEMO version of Auto-Tune (Antares) that I uninstalled but Digital Performer 7 continues to think exists on the Mac Pro, but I will solve that minor annoyance, sooner or later . . . ]
I use the N2 and N3 orchestral instruments for a few things, but mostly I use Miroslav Philharmonik for orchestral instruments, since there are more readily available articulations, dynamics, and a virtual festival of solo and ensemble samples, where for example I like French Horns and mostly as a matter of curiosity tried to count all the flavors of French Horns in Miroslav Philharmonik, but after stepping through all the folders and subfolders for about an hour in the standalone user interface, I stopped counting at 150, which is a
lot of French Horn samples, really . . .
Really! SUGGESTIONS Printing is highly dependent on the operating system platform (Mac or Windows), as well as the specific printing device, and it also is highly dependent on the various type families and fonts . . .
For example, two decades ago I did a lot of graphic design work for magazine advertisements, and I did it on a Windows machine using CorelDRAW!, but the magazines required four-color (CMYK) separations on film, so I had to go to Kinko's and use an Apple computer to get a disk copy of the separations in POSTSCRIPT with the target printer selected to Apple LaserWriter Plus, which was pretty strange, and then those disks went to a film lab that printed the separations for about $50 each, which took a day or two, so after doing this a few times one tends to strive diligently to discover how to get it done correctly the first time . . .
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NOTE: The Apple LaserWriter Plus printer was the industry standard for POSTSCRIPT, apparently because it generated data that all the various film machines were able to use correctly with accurate and reliable results . . . ]
Two decades later, everything is considerably easier in some respects, but the fact of the matter is that the quality of printer drivers and associated typesetting software is not always so stellar, so one of the first things I consider when there are problems with printing is the printer
and the printer driver, since sometimes getting everything to work correctly involves configuring the printer or perhaps using a different printer driver . . .
In other words, the authoring application (Notion 3, Pages, Word, or whatever) might be doing everything correctly, but the printer is not configured properly or there is a problem with the specific printer driver . . .
QUESTION: Does everything in the score in the PDF file I provided look correct? If everything is correctly formatted and so forth, then this virtually guarantees that any printing problems are caused by the printer and printer driver . . .
As noted, when I first generated a PDF, there were problems, but the problems were caused by the specific paper size, which was too small, so I selected a larger page size . . .
If the printable area for a specific size of paper allows printing 12 lines but you tell it to print 13 lines, then it is
not going to print correctly, so it is very important to know the printable area, which will be specific to each printer, where in this usage "printer" refers to the physical hardware device . . .
At the dawn of the early-21st century, the reality is that most relatively inexpensive printers cost less than a set of ink cartridges, and in some instances this maps to not having the most stellar printer drives and so forth, so while something might not print correctly on one printer, it just as easily can print correctly on another printer or even on the same printer if you select a different printer driver, but this also depends on the operating system platform, since printer drivers tend to be operating system platform dependent . . .
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NOTE: From a not so futuristic perspective, the iPad is quite likely to replace paper for sheet music, although when this will occur is difficult to determine. However, there already are music stands designed specifically for using an iPad on stage, so it is not so far into the future, really . . . ]
QUESTION: Are you doing this on a Windows machine or on a Mac? As noted, the operating system platform makes a difference, but you should be able to print on both platforms, really . . .
Really! On the Mac, I get good results with Epson printers and their Mac OS X drivers, where I like the Epson Stylus Photo printers, since they also print on CD and DVD, as well as do photograph quality printing, but the photographic paper and ink cost so much that I tend to avoid printing whenever possible . . .
SUMMARY (1) There is a procedure for submitting bug reports, and the instructions are provided in a topic in the top part of the list of topics for this FORUM, but I am not certain that submitting a bug report actually maps to getting a response . . .
http://forum.notionmusic.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=807(2) Once I fully realized that Notion 3 is an amazing application for what I need to do, I switched my focus to discovering how to do what I need to do, which in a very real sense maps to being my own technical support, which for the most part I am able to do, since I have a lot of experience with computer software, which in some respects make it both possible and practical for me essentially to create simulacrums of the Notion 3 software engineers to a level of detail that allows me to understand the way they think when they are designing algorithms, which in turn makes it easier for me to determine with reasonably good accuracy why something might not work the way I think it should work, as well as to devise a way either (a) to make it work the way I think it should work or (b) to avoid the specific conditions in which an otherwise very elegant algorithm behaves inelegantly, which for the most part is a matter of the way the various Apple frameworks are designed, which basically traces back to the days when Apple fired Steve Jobs and he started a new company (NeXT), which 15 or so years later results in such wonders of modern technology as Core Data, which transforms something that is virtually trivial to do with low-level C/API and basic SQL statements into a virtually mind-boggling maze that simply cannot handle highly abstruse metadata, hence requires having hundreds of tables instead of just a few tables, as well as not being able to do what I consider to be simple joins and whatever, but so what . . .
So what! (3) You might want to call Notion Music technical support, since they might be able to provide some help or suggestions . . .
This is all that comes to mind at present, which is fabulous . . .
Fabulous! P. S. Another thing that I discovered when I first was making sense of Notion 3 is that it tends to be best to avoid using the predefined score templates when you have very specific instrument requirements that do not map
exactly to a predefined template . . .
Since nothing I do maps to any of the standard Notion 3 predefined score templates, I switched to creating specific instruments one at a time, which solved quite a few problems for me, since I was modifying the predefined templates, and recently there was a discussion about user-defined templates where
fabiolcati explained how to create user-defined templates on the Mac so that they appear in the list of templates in Notion 3, which is stellar . . .
http://forum.notionmusic.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1439&p=6026#p6026Stellar! Another useful bit of information regarding my overall perspective is that one year ago I could read, write, and sight-sing
Classical music so long as it was on the treble clef, but that was all I was aware I could do in any immediately conscious way, yet one year later after perhaps 1,500 to 2,000 hours of discovering how music notation and VSTi instruments work in Notion 3, I can do elaborate orchestration, which most recently includes making a bit of progress on discovering how to do post-Baroque ornamentation, for sure . . .
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NOTE: This is a flavor of the harpsichord from "The Prince of Denmark's March" (Jeremiah Clarke) that I used for a bit of FUN with post-Baroque ornamentation . . . ]
http://www.surfwhammys.com/Ornamented-H ... rmonik.mp3For sure! So, in the grand scheme of everything, being able to make sense of the way everything in Notion 3 works is mapping to
significant progress here in the sound isolation studio, which is fabulous . . .
Fabulous!