Creating PDFs from Sibelius 7

I’ve noticed that one of the most frequently viewed posts on this blog is Creating PDFs from Sibelius by Daniel Spreadbury. It’s with good reason; a PDF file is, more or less, the lingua franca of electronic documents, viewable on practically any system and device. To share your Sibelius scores with the wider electronic world, and to have anyone view and print your score exactly as you intend it to look, PDF files are the way to do it.

I’ve also noticed that the post was written in 2008, when Sibelius 5 was the current version — a lifetime ago in the world of computing (for example, the first iPad was released in 2010)! Creating PDF files is such a common, important task, and since Sibelius 7 offers new and different options than its predecessors, a new blog post on the topic is overdue. So, without any further throat-clearing…

Start off by going to File > Export > PDF. This is the first difference between Sibelius 7 and earlier versions of Sibelius. Sibelius 7 is the first version to include PDF file creation as an export function built into the program, as opposed to using the OS dialog or additional software.

Upon going here, you will see a list of options under Export (if there are no parts in your file, only the first one, Score only, will be available):

• Score only exports only the full score
• Score and all parts (one file) exports the full score and a single copy of each part into a single PDF file
• Score and all parts (separate files) exports the full score and a single copy of each part, each as its own separate PDF file
• All parts only (separate files) exports a single copy of each part, each as its own separate PDF file
• All parts only (one file) exports a single copy of each part into a single PDF file
• Selection of parts (separate files) exports a single copy of each part chosen from the list directly to the right of the list of options, each as its own separate PDF file
• Selection of parts (one file) exports a single copy of each part chosen from the list directly to the right of the list of options into a single PDF file

For the last two options, you can select any combination of parts from the list by click-dragging or by holding down Shift and clicking contiguous part names, or by pressing Command (Ctrl on PC) and clicking on non-contiguous part names.

It is a good idea to strategically make use of Sibelius 7’s Filename feature:

By default Sibelius names the files according to the tokens %f – %p.pdf which evaluate to “[Filename] – [Part name].pdf” or, e.g., “Symphony – Flute 1.pdf”. Sensible as this may first seem, if you were to export all parts as separate files in an orchestral score, you’d wind up with an alphabetized list where the contrabass appears between the clarinets and flutes, among other oddities:

Better to add the token %n for a total string of %n – %f – %p.pdf which would evaluate to “[Part number] – [Filename] – [Part name].pdf” or, e.g., “01 – Symphony – Flute 1.pdf”. This way your PDF files will remain in score order once exported:

Note that if you include the full score in your export, Sibelius will number it “00”. Various other tokens are available for your use, including ones for the score title, the total number of parts, the date and the time. You can, of course, type ordinary text in addition to the tokens.

To finish exporting your PDF files, choose the destination folder using the standard file browser, and click the big Export button.

Some people may still need to create PDF files in the earlier way, for instance, to satisfy a publisher’s requirements for a particular flavor of PDF or to use custom presets. To do this on Mac OS X, go to File > Print and click the “Use OS dialog” button at the very bottom of the screen. This will allow you to create PostScript files that can be distilled using Adobe settings instead of Sibelius’s built-in settings. On Windows, there’s no direct equivalent of the Mac OS Print dialog, but you can choose a PDF printer driver as the printer and click the Printer Properties link/button to access the detailed options.

Sibelius 7’s built-in PDF file creator is a great feature, but one downside is that it is no longer possible to create 2-up PDF files directly from Sibelius. In order to do this with the help of some free software, see this blog post from earlier this year.

One other note: if for some reason you’re not using the most recent update to Sibelius 7 (currently 7.1.3 from September 2012), be sure to update to this point release. A number of improvements related to PDF exporting and printing were made in 7.1.3.