Music fonts (and spacing)

Thanks for the quick replies.

Henrick: This is very interesting (and you obviously know what you're talking about) but not very helpful. I'm not a font person so I have no idea what a Last Resort Font, intelligent font file, Character Map, imgageable, or line layout support is and more importantly how they relate to my questions. It sounds like you're telling me how to design a font. That's beyond my scope.

Tom: Of course the first place I looked was the Special Characters/Character Pallette (I should have said so). Aside from the annoying glitch that every time I open the special characters it makes the input menu appear (which I don't want and have to go back to system preferences to turn off), it's not a good solution. There is indeed a sharp, flat, and natural, listed under Music but these were not designed by a musician and look more like cartoon music, worse than the # and b that I now use. (Musicians, especially those in academe are required by law to be picky.)

So let me reiterate, or reword my questions:

I have three or four music fonts that look "engraved." For this question let's use Opus. It's pretty common.

1) If I want to use Opus, how do I get the spacing correct in Pages?

2) Has anyone out there found a music font that was intended for text? Such that I can switch back and forth as I would between Times and Courier?

3) (Just for my own curiosity.) Why (though I suspect Henrick answered this and it's just over my head) do the music fonts I have do this? Or dare I say, why do they look so great in their intended program, but not in Pages? Are they just poorly designed?

Ah, now this is a little closer to what I was asking. I'll experiment.

Thanks.

Ok, I did a little fiddling, and first, all the links I followed (granted, not exhaustive, which is why I started this thread--I'm waiting for that one guy who has had this problem, knows the answer and can send me there) showed a great variety of fonts, but _designed for music programs_ such as Finale, Sibelius, etc.

I tried the baseline, but while it did lower the character itself, it had no effect on the amount of vertical space the character used.

Isn't there a setting in Pages that will force the height of the line? I can't find it.

You would think, and I tried that, but it changes the spacing of the entire paragraph. And even then the line with the sharp character is still proportionally larger than the others. In Word it is in the Paragraph Format dialog. For "line spacing" you can choose "At Least" or "Exactly." Setting it to "Exactly" 16 pts works nicely.

But still, the real solution is a font that is intended for text.

Really!?! It's as if they were reading my mind, or I'm reading theirs, or something. The top one looks better.

We're planning to update, but they are cautious, and sometimes wait and watch for issues with a new system. But maybe I'll get them to just do my machine as a test.

Could you paste an example with these characters interlaced with text? For example, a paragraph where the middle lines use C# and Eb?

BTW: where are the instructions for including images in one of these posts? I need to learn how to do it.

Never mind (about the image). I found it.

Here is a test:

Image: !http://fileserver.music.utah.edu/~dcottle/Music/Music intext.png!

BINGO!

+Font variation+ was the key. When I first tried the character palette, I just clicked on the default character in the main window, which, as I said above, looks like a cartoon sharp; what you might use in a speech bubble above a cartoon boy advertising a school play next to a "la la la." But once I got into the variations I found two that look quite nice. One was in Apple Symbols:

!http://fileserver.music.utah.edu/~dcottle/Music/Music in_textbingo.png!

I have to say, I miss the old OS 9 Keycaps, where you could click on a little icon and see all the characters in a font. I guess I just need to learn the character palette better.

I've been trying to solve this problem for years.

That was my big issue. But if anyone has answers to further questions:

1) I've searched high and low for a little app that would show all the characters in a given font, like keycaps. All the "font" apps seem to just show a sampling so you can see what the alphabet looks like. I want a map showing every character. Neither KeyboardViewer nor character palette do it. At least I can't see where. Plus, keyboardviewer has a very short list of fonts. And I don't see such an option in character palette. It's organized by symbol, not font. (But I couldn't figure out the "variations", so maybe I'm just not seeing it.)

2) Why are most music fonts so poorly designed for text? (Just curious.)

The last piece to the puzzle. How to make it less cumbersome. I will often type a sentence like: the chord Ab, Cb, Eb, Gb can be respelled with an F#, resolving to a G(natural), taking us from Ab to C(natural) by way of the Ab to F# augmented sixth. With the current solution I have to open the character palette and click on the symbol ten times for just one sentence.

The solution: Use Quickeys and create "clip" abbreviations so that "##" will be replaced with an Apple Symbol sharp.

Voila!