Gerd Castan's wonderful site ( lists one Unicode Western Musical Symbols font, Euterpe, available at: Ensuring that all their data structures are aware of the change and handle it properly is a major rewrite - and don't forget testing! MM would probably also be forced to use newer text-handling APIs for both platforms than they currently do. The real problem for MakeMusic is that they would have to change every line of code that referred to fonts, to reflect the change from single-byte to double-byte. I can currently use the Maestro font in several other apps that only support Unicode encoding. The fact that it maps the music symbols to 'ASCII' glyphs, rather than using the Unicode 'approved' positions is irrelevant. Finale could use the same Maestro single-byte fonts that it does now, but still support Unicode. (Previously used everything back to version 2.0.1) Seriously using FinWin 2006, 2007 or 2008 almost daily. I strongly suspect the skimpy resources for actual music notation in the Unicode standard may be one of the reasons why Finale has yet to adopt a Unicode-friendly approach to TEXT notation, which would make life so much simpler for some people. (That presents interesting possibilities!)Īccording to Microsoft (), the Arial Unicode MS font 'contains glyphs for all code points within the Unicode Standard, version 2.1.' I couldn't find any music characters, sad to say. It may be woefully inadequate for actual music engraving, but is apparently useful for something like a web page. If anyone is interested, the Unicode chart for musical symbols can be found at. Post Edited (Michael Good) : 4:02:01 PM (GMT-6) But they may work if your musical examples are sufficiently straightforward. Unicode Western musical symbols are incomplete, so they tend not to be used even for their intended purpose of inline text. Have I seen your name on an OU forum.? But I've said too much.įinale 2009c, 2Ghz iMac 2Ghz MacBook, 10.6.1Įdirol FA-66 M-Audio Oxygen 61 Yamaha PSR-410

If you do indeed need the a text font that includes musical characters in those glyph positions, then you may have to use a font editor to graft the symbols from your old font into the 1D00 - 1D1FF range of your Unicode text font. So, for example, I can use Type 1 fonts in a text document, and that text can be encoded as UTF-8, UTF-16, Windows, Mac OS Roman, ISO 2022 Japanese, or any other type of Unicode encoding.

Why does the FONT need to be Unicode? I would have thought that the app and the OS would handle the encoding, and the font would be irrelevant. You may find a complete Unicode font that includes them, but I'd be surprised. Neither seems to use the Unicode music positions. As far as I know, music fonts are divided into those used for notation, and those used for inserting music symbols into body text. I had a discussion about Unicode musical characters on another forum.

Music word font