OT: Musical symbols for use in MS Word 2010

[gogreen]

I include rhythmic examples and time signatures in my performance notes for pieces. I currently use the Bach font for this, and it works fine, but it can be cumbersome to build time signatures and notes to show rhythmic patterns. I'm wondering--how do you add musical symbols to text and build time signatures in text, and what fonts do you use?

[N Grossingink]

Check out these - the Rhythms font and the Times+Musical Symbols font.
http://hindson.com.au/info/free/free-fo ... -download/

N.

[BuonTempi]

Word is an app that lays down one font character after another. Any solution is going to rely on this.

Your best bet is to create a "scratchpad" document of the symbols of groups of symbols that you use, and then copy and paste them from there.

[gogreen]

Check out these - the Rhythms font and the Times+Musical Symbols font.
http://hindson.com.au/info/free/free-fo ... r-download

Thanks, N. I downloaded the Rhythms font. I'll work with it and see how it compares to the Bach font. I'm used to working with the Bach-ts font to create time signatures--I actually like it, once I learned how it works. The Times+Musical Symbols font sounds interesting, but it's only for Mac and I'm a Windows person.

Your best bet is to create a "scratchpad" document of the symbols of groups of symbols that you use, and then copy and paste them from there.

Good idea, BuonTempi. Thanks. What I do now is copy material from previous documents.

I was just curious to see if anyone has a different way to handle placing musical symbols in a Word document.

[MikeHalloran]

Yea... Word 2010 is Windows.

The suggestion to enter all of the characters you use most often in another Word doc is clumsy at best—when you paste, it may retain your document font. A better way is to create a .pdf showing the character in both Times New Roman and the music font you will use. Now, when typing, look at your guide, change to your music font of choice and type the appropriate character. It will display the correct glyph. Change back to your text font and continue.

There are some cool ways to do this on a Mac built into the OS Utilities—in fact, you can use any of the Finale fonts if you like. You are not on a Mac, however. No doubt there are some cool apps for that but I've no idea what they are.

[gogreen]

The suggestion to enter all of the characters you use most often in another Word doc is clumsy at best—when you paste, it may retain your document font.

Windows and Word let you do this. It's easy to paste with the source formatting, the destination formatting, or no formatting. Pasting with the source formatting is what you'd want to retain the Bach or Rhythm font. It's pretty easy in Word, too.

Moot point for me--I can create an odd-meter time signature, for example, faster than I can copy from another document and paste.

[motet]

Why does the flat in the Bach font lie so low?

0041.png (3.11 KiB) Viewed 8751 times

Maestro Times doesn't have this problem, but I don't like the looks of its flat symbol much.

[gogreen]

Why does the flat in the Bach font lie so low? Maestro Times doesn't have this problem, but I don't like the looks of its flat symbol much.

I don't know why the Bach font (and Maestro font) flat is so low. There's probably a way to nudge them upward in MS Word, but I don't know how to do that--I'll try to find out how. I agree about the Maestro Times font flat. I also don't like the way they all increase the line leading.

[motet]

I couldn't find a way to shift the baseline in Word.

[miker]

I couldn't find a way to shift the baseline in Word.

https://www.techwalla.com/articles/how- ... in-ms-word

(Found with Google. No idea if it works!)

[motet]

Thanks, Mike! I didn't know about the Advanced tab. Curiously, "baseline shift" and "baseline" were not helpful in Word's help search.

[Charles Lawrence]

Worked fine for me. The size of the font determines how much positioning is required.

Highlight the text to be baseline shifted. CTRL-D to open Font dialog box, choose Advanced tab. In Position: choose raised or lowered. In By: enter the number of units you want. You can use various suffixes like pt, in, cm, etc. Pt seems to be the default for me.

[gogreen]

Here's how I did the attached: Insert > Quick Parts > Field > Advance > Offset text up. Then I clicked that box and simply entered "1" in the field. Remember to use Offset text down with another "1" after the symbol. This adjustment didn't affect line leading. I used the Bach font flat sign.

Charles Lawrence's method is better because it doesn't require the extra step of offsetting the text down again. Still, as in Finale, there are two ways in Word to accomplish the same thing.