Unicode Support
Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 2:11 pm
In future releases, please provide Unicode font support for Lyrics and Text. (Perhaps this could be done as a plug-in?)
In my work with Finale, both for musicology studies and for church settings, I need to create lyrics using polytonic Greek and Church Slavonic. These languages use orthographical systems with many, many diacriticals -- the numbers of characters go beyond what is available in any ASCII scheme. The character sets are readily available in Unicode fonts -- but Finale does not yet yet support Unicode. I know a number of musicians doing the same kind of work, who have lamented this situation. Some have turned away from Finale to other notation systems.
In the meantime, the work-around I've devised is laborious, and produces unsatisfactory visual results for character spacing, hyphens and word extensions:
1. Set the music in Finale.
2. Enter lyrics, preferably in a font from the same family as the one to be used in the final product (helps with spacing and character width).
3. Export the page as a graphic.
4. Use a word-processing program to create the lyrics with the appropriate diacriticals, and break this text so that it corresponds with the text on each system in the Finale page. (Not all word-processing programs support Unicode in text boxes or text fields, though they may do so for text entered directly into the document.)
5. Import the Finale graphic from step 3 into a word-processing or presentation or page program.
6. For each line of text in the score, create a text box or text field, set its fill property to opaque white, superimpose it over the Finale lyric line.
7. Copy the appropriate text from step 4 into the correct text field.
8. Edit the line of text for spacing.
9. Enter undescores for word extensions.
If anyone has a better work-around, I'd be grateful to hear about it!
In my work with Finale, both for musicology studies and for church settings, I need to create lyrics using polytonic Greek and Church Slavonic. These languages use orthographical systems with many, many diacriticals -- the numbers of characters go beyond what is available in any ASCII scheme. The character sets are readily available in Unicode fonts -- but Finale does not yet yet support Unicode. I know a number of musicians doing the same kind of work, who have lamented this situation. Some have turned away from Finale to other notation systems.
In the meantime, the work-around I've devised is laborious, and produces unsatisfactory visual results for character spacing, hyphens and word extensions:
1. Set the music in Finale.
2. Enter lyrics, preferably in a font from the same family as the one to be used in the final product (helps with spacing and character width).
3. Export the page as a graphic.
4. Use a word-processing program to create the lyrics with the appropriate diacriticals, and break this text so that it corresponds with the text on each system in the Finale page. (Not all word-processing programs support Unicode in text boxes or text fields, though they may do so for text entered directly into the document.)
5. Import the Finale graphic from step 3 into a word-processing or presentation or page program.
6. For each line of text in the score, create a text box or text field, set its fill property to opaque white, superimpose it over the Finale lyric line.
7. Copy the appropriate text from step 4 into the correct text field.
8. Edit the line of text for spacing.
9. Enter undescores for word extensions.
If anyone has a better work-around, I'd be grateful to hear about it!