9. The Score

Exporting the Score as PDF

A PDF is how a score leaves Stab for the music stand: printed, sent to a player, or read on a tablet. Stab writes it from a Score pane, as its pages, with the song’s style from Score Setup.

The Score as a PDF

Available on every platform.

Exporting

1. Open the song, with a Score pane showing what you want on paper: the working score, some of its tracks, or a presentation.
2. Choose Print… (⌘P)Print… (Ctrl+P)Print… (or File › Export As › Score PDF…): the Export sheet opens on Score PDF, the presentation the Score pane shows ticked.
3. Under Scores, tick the presentations to write (a song with none has one row: the Score as its pane shows it). With several, Files chooses one PDF with them in order (in the apps for Mac, iPad and iPhone) or a PDF each, in a folder.
4. Choose Save PDF (the folder in the sheet), or Print… to send the pages to the system’s printing. Choose Download. The first time, the page fetches the score’s fonts, which takes a moment.

What’s in it

The PDF is the Score pane’s score, as Page View lays it out, whether or not the pane shows pages:

• What the pane shows: its tracks or its presentation, with that presentation’s breaks and style; its music font; its TAB staff; concert or written pitch.
• The page: Score Setup’s size, orientation and margins, staff size and spacing. See Score Setup.
• Black on white, whatever the pane’s theme or a presentation’s. To have PDFs in the theme the Score shows (a presentation’s own, else the pane’s), tick Look in the Export sheet, or turn on Export PDFs in the Score’s theme in Settings; it applies to every PDF Stab writes on that device.
• The title (the song’s name) and the credits on the first page.

The PDF is drawn as vector pages, so it prints sharp at any size. Its text can be selected and searched.

For a PDF of each part at once, tick them all under Scores; see Presentations and parts.

When there’s nothing to export

A song with no notes to write has no pages, so there’s nothing to export. A song someone shares with you whose owner doesn’t allow copies can’t be exported either: the export isn’t available on it.