Re: printed stems in OS X vs Windows 7

[Tim McNamara]

On Feb 28, 2012, at 7:45 PM, Bryn Hughes wrote:
> 
> I haven't tried this (silly, I know), but I will try tomorrow morning when I 
> get to work. I'm starting to think that it IS the viewer. Would the PDF 
> viewer actually affect the printout? I believe I was using Preview on the 
> mac. Has anyone else had difficulties with this particular program?
> 
> Thanks to all for your responses!
> 
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 8:40 PM, Nick Payne <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 29/02/12 06:42, Bryn Hughes wrote:
> Hello, all.
> 
> I'm a musician and music theorist who has been back and forth to lilypond 
> over the past few years, and I've recently decided to make the effort to 
> learn lilypond thoroughly enough that it can become my main notation 
> software. I have a question that I hope is not too ignorant. I've searched 
> through the manuals and other online resources and can't seem to figure out 
> the answer. Here's hoping one of you experts has a solution.
> 
> I use both a Mac (at work) and a Windows machine (at home), and I've noticed 
> some subtle but important discrepancies when rendering PDFs with lilypond on 
> each of my machines. Specifically, I notice that when I render the PDF on my 
> iMac, the stems are misaligned with their respective noteheads. I also notice 
> that in some places the noteheads seem slightly detached from the stems.  
> Conversely, on when I render the PDF in Windows, the problem disappears. 
> Instead, I find that my margins have been ignored, and everything looks 
> slightly larger.  Overall, I'd say that the rendering on Windows looks much 
> better, though it'd be nice to have full control of formatting as well.
> 
> If you create PDFs from the same ly file on both platforms using the same 
> version of Lilypond, and view the PDFs on one platform, do they look 
> different? i.e. Is the variation in the PDF viewer.
> 
> Nick

I use Preview on my Mac and it works fine.  Try increasing the image size- at 
smaller sizes (e.g., seeing the whole page at once) Preview sometimes renders 
things oddly, but as you "zoom in" the rendering becomes more accurate.  
Printing Lilypond scores from Preview has always been fine for me.