How to use music notation as a character

Question

Level 4

1,237 points

How to use music notation as a character

I would like to know how to use standard music notation symbols as if they were a character in text. I cannot seem to find any of these characters in the character viewer. For example, I want to display the notation for a “sharp" or a “flat.” To clarify, I want these symbols to appear in text, not on a musical staff using music composition software. Any help appreciated!

iMac 27" i7-860 quad core W8003 2.8GHz, 2TB SATA, 16GB, ATI 4850 512MB, Mac OS X (10.6.5), iPod touch 4G 64GB, iPhone 3G 16GB, Powerbook G4 1.67 GHz, Canon Pro9500 Mark II

Posted on Mar 30, 2011 5:00 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Bob Lang1

Level 5

4,090 points

Mar 30, 2011 5:32 PM in response to Rick Lang

Hi Rick

Those musical symbols have unicode values of U+266F for sharp and U+266D for flat. You can find others using Google (eg. unicode natural). The symbols are listed in the "Miscellaneous Symbols" Unicode subset.

Not every font will contain these symbols, but Apple Symbols is one that does. In your document you can select the Apple Symbols font then choose the character - the precise way you do this depends upon the word processor you're using. In Open Office, you select Insert > Special Character, then set the font to Apple Symbols, and the subset to Miscellaneous Symbols, then click on the character(s) you want to insert. The process is similar in TextEdit: select the font then Edit > Special Characters... and scroll down to 00002600 Miscellaneous Symbols, and then select the one you want.

Be aware that if you pass on the document to another user then they may not have the font installed and the document won't print correctly. In such cases, a fool proof but more complex way around the problem is to create a little graphic file containing the symbol glyph and drop that into the document.

Bob

Reply

Answer 2

Rick Lang Author

Level 4

1,237 points

Mar 30, 2011 10:12 PM in response to Bob Lang1

Thanks Meg and Bob. I had the Roman character set selected in Character Viewer when I should have had All Characters selected and then scrolled down to Musical Symbols. That’s what I was looking for to reference musical notation in a text document. But I don’t need the ability to display full staffs with notation as Meg’s solution provides.

Reply

Answer 3

Meg The Dog

Level 6

13,591 points

Mar 30, 2011 5:18 PM in response to Rick Lang

http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/aah-yes/blank-manuscript/

MtD

Reply

Answer 4

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

118,240 points

Mar 31, 2011 6:31 AM in response to Rick Lang

If you want the full range of musical symbols available in Unicode range 1D100, you can download extra fonts like Euterpe, Musical Symbols, Quivira, or Symbola from the internet.

Reply

Answer 5

Rick Lang Author

Level 4

1,237 points

Apr 1, 2011 4:45 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thank you, Tom. Euterpe does not seem to be available yet from openfontlibrary.org but I did find Quivira which seems fine.

Reply

Answer 6

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

118,240 points

Apr 1, 2011 5:03 PM in response to Rick Lang

Euterpe does not seem to be available yet from openfontlibrary.org

That's odd, it's been available for a while earlier. I can send you a copy if you want (tom at bluesky dot org).

Reply