The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #96784   Message #1907140
Posted By: JohnInKansas
12-Dec-06 - 02:03 AM
Thread Name: Tech: Flat symbol ???
Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ???
The "Lucida Sans Unicode" is the only font I've found that is widely installed for Windows users that claims specifically to be a "Unicode Font," and it is NOT A COMPLETE character set.

The ONLY Unicode font supplied by Microsoft that contains glyphs for all characters in the Unicode standard (ver 2.1) is the "Arial Unicode MS" mentioned above at 30 Nov 06 - 06:05 PM. Since the full-set font is 22MB, (and looks like crap), it is NOT RECOMMENDED except for those who simply have to use it.

Note that both of these "Unicode" fonts are sans serif forms. So far as I've found there is no common serif font that includes large numbers of generic Unicode characters in the set.

Several other fonts that are almost universal for Windows users (recent versions) have "Extended Character Sets" to include "letters" commonly used in particular languages, but "music" doesn't appear to be considered a common enough language for these symbols to appear in any that I've found. These fonts may contain some, or in some cases quite a few, "Unicode characters" but the selection is limited.

If the Lucida Sans Unicode font is satisfactory for the rest of your document, in Word you can use it for the whole document. Note that this font displays (and prints) about twice as tall as most fonts of the same "point size," so you may need some other adjustments.

To insert a Unicode character in a Word document using "Lucida Sans Unicode" throughout the document, type the "hex character number" and use Alt-X immediately to change it to the actual character glyph.

This should provide a way to create, save, and print documents for use on your local machine; but there are real problems with posting in this font (aside from it being sort of ugly for general use).

John