Music font query

English
#1

mike@RPI4b2D:~> uname -a
Linux MikesPI 6.1.93 #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Dec 8 02:37:53 CET 2025 aarch64 GNU/Linux

Version: 25.2.3.2 (AARCH64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 520(Build:2)
CPU threads: 4; OS: Linux 6.1; UI render: default; VCL: x11
Locale: en-US (C); UI: en-US
Debian package version: 4:25.2.3-2+deb13u3
Calc: threaded

A pdf of dulcimer tablature here:
https://www.dulcimertab.com/wp-content/uploads/tab/home_on_the_range.pdf
displays in Firefox showing notes. Printing that pdf in lodraw substitutes “U” and “V” for the notes.
What font is required to get lodraw to print the note symbols?
Thanks,
Mike

#2

The PDF seems to be created by TEFview Handbuch - Installation. In the PDF itself (looked at it with an editor) I see hints to font Tef265.

Why do you need to open the PDF file in LibreOffice? For printing you can use Firefox.

1 Like
#3

Firefox here only allows to print to PDF and I’ve not yet found how to tell it to use lp or give it the 192.168.1.4 address.

FF version 140.4.0esr (aarch64)

#4

I have tested using the Tef265.tff font. I have saved the file as .fodg and used an editor to replace all occurrences of “Unknown” with “Tef265”. You can get the music symbols, but the position of the frames are too low and I see no simple way to correct that.

I would try to get the printer working. Have you already contacted a Linux community? I’m on Windows 11 and cannot help you in this regard.

Another idea: Create screenshots (e.g. using Firefox), arrange these images in LibreOffice and print that.

#5

Regina,
Thanks for the ideas.
Be well,
Mike

#6

You can try to print it with any pdf viewer like okular,
The fact that Firefox cannot print anything other than PDF is due to (1) the fact that you have not selected the printer, (2) the Firefox configuration or the configuration of your (3) computer.
and finally, the simplest thing, that your printer is not turned on

#7

Try opening your file directly in Google Chrome, which recently added native support for the PDF format.

#8

Re: Google Chrome, I have a tendency not to trust snoops.
I spent well over an hour trying to find how to tell firefox to use my networked printer with no luck. LOdraw had no trouble using lpr but the notes didn’t print as notes.
Installing xpdf solved my problem.
Thanks all,
Mike

#9

I have created a bug report tdf#171031 about the not rendered music symbols.

1 Like
#10

If your need is to print the PDF sheet music, rather than “Open” into the LO Draw module simply “Insert” the PDF. Very different handling, Insert has very high fidelity to source PDF while Opening attempts to render the objects from the PDF into LibreOffice draw shapes and draw text boxes with dependencies on how poppler parses the PDF.

Insert is done a PDF page at a time, so you may need to first split a multipage PDF with a utility (e.g. PDFtk). Can Insert onto a Draw drawing, an Impress slide, or a Writer document page.

For Insert, LibreOffice uses the pdfium libs from the Chormium project for this. They are pixel perfect to the layout of the source PDF, and resolution onto document (and result when printing) can be increased or decreased by setting a variable PDFIMPORT_RESOLUTION_DPI. Last I checked default was 96dpi, for printing of full pages I find I have to increase to 300dpi.

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