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Tech: Flat symbol ???
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Subject: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST,clockwatcher Date: 29 Nov 06 - 07:37 AM Typing a sharp symbol is easy, just use the hash key and you can type C#, F# or whatever. But how do type a flat symbol ? Is there a combination of keys, or some easy way of pasting it in word or in an entry field ? And I don't just mean using a lower-case ' b ' , that looks pathetic. Anyone know ? |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST,Jon Date: 29 Nov 06 - 07:46 AM For what, for posting here? Looking at one website you could try: ♩ ♩ ♪ ♪ ♫ ♫ ♬ ♬ ♭ ♭ ♮ ♮ ♯ ♯ For here. Not sure how reliable it will be though. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: Mr Yellow Date: 29 Nov 06 - 07:49 AM 1, 3, 4 , 5 & 6 are just squares - I think it needs the right font which in a browser and on the 'Cat maybe be a little difficult. First catch your font............ |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: s&r Date: 29 Nov 06 - 07:49 AM This might help You do need a music font. There is nothing in standard fonts that I'm aware of. Stu |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST Date: 29 Nov 06 - 07:56 AM It's the character encoding, Mt Yellow. "Mine" seems to work with utf-8 and Western(ISO-8859-1) but may fail with others. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: Scrump Date: 29 Nov 06 - 08:12 AM And I don't just mean using a lower-case ' b ' , that looks pathetic Nonsense, I thought that was what the lower case 'b' was invented for :-) |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST Date: 29 Nov 06 - 08:17 AM In the various texts I proofread, the standard was lower case b italic. Squeaky |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 29 Nov 06 - 08:24 AM Jon, only number 6 doesn;t work for me above... just a standard set up MSIE here - except I use Arial font. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: NormanD Date: 29 Nov 06 - 08:33 AM Could someone please tell me where the "Hash" / "Sharp" symbol is on the Mac keyboard? |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: Tootler Date: 29 Nov 06 - 08:44 AM Like it or not, lower case 'b' is the best bet as it can be rendered in any text file. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST,Jack Campin Date: 29 Nov 06 - 09:31 AM ABC uses ASCII characters for that - you write ^F for F sharp and _B for B flat. None of "GUEST, Jon"'s characters works in my browser, they must be Windows-specific codes. Here is an HTML rendering of what they look like to me:
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST,Jon Date: 29 Nov 06 - 09:33 AM Most certainly not, Jack. I am on Linux. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: JennyO Date: 29 Nov 06 - 09:45 AM Yeah, of course they all worked for me Jon. Here is a page which might help some. Scroll down to Music. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: Grab Date: 29 Nov 06 - 09:46 AM If you want to get techical about it, the hash symbol and the sharp symbol are different anyway. The sharp symbol's "horizontal" lines actually go up - they have to, otherwise you wouldn't be able to see them on the stave. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: Bernard Date: 29 Nov 06 - 09:49 AM All but 3 and 6 (show as squares) work for me... I'm on a fairly standard XP Pro set-up at work as I write this. I've got Tahoma as my web page viewing font - but I'm still on IE6 here, as IE7 wouldn't work! When I get home I'll take a look-see on my XP Home / IE7 set-up. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST,Jom Date: 29 Nov 06 - 09:51 AM Have just tried Windoze on both character sets that worked on Linux. I only get 2 to display properly... |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: Bill D Date: 29 Nov 06 - 10:03 AM here is the list of the characters one can get on a PC. Music only symbols are not included. Thus, to show a 'flat' online, one would need to use Bb, as mentioned above. With a music font on your computer, you can enter stuff for your own use and print it. http://www.theworldofstuff.com/characters/ |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: Bill D Date: 29 Nov 06 - 10:07 AM (note...if you don't see all the characters they list on that page, it means your currently installed font does not have them all....but most people don't change the default display font, and can 'probably' see most of them on a PC.) |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: leeneia Date: 29 Nov 06 - 11:22 AM Just use a b or write "flat" and get on with the making of music. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: MMario Date: 29 Nov 06 - 11:26 AM you can use an italic 'b' which is slightly better then just 'b' |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: NormanD Date: 29 Nov 06 - 11:57 AM so nobody knows where the "Hash" key is on the Mac keyboard then? I'll just write sharp and b italic.... |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: Bee-dubya-ell Date: 29 Nov 06 - 12:15 PM Hash key = "#". We yanks usually call it the "pound sign" because that's what the US telephone folks call it. "Pound sign" has a totally different meaning in the UK since "pound" is both a measure of weight and a currency denomination. Say "pound sign " to a Brit and he thinks "£". |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: Bernard Date: 29 Nov 06 - 02:07 PM Hmmm... the plot thickens! ALL the symbols are visible on my XP Home / IE7 installation... I'm not aware that I have an unusual version of the Tahoma font installed which could explain this. However, I've just been into the IE settings, and there's a font listed called 'Symusic'... when I highlight it, music symbols appear in the preview. Curious! When I look in Character Map, there are a few music symbols in the font, some Greek letters (not the full alphabet), but no western alphabet. Oddly, the 'hash' and the 'sharp' symbol are not identical. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: JohnInKansas Date: 29 Nov 06 - 04:03 PM There is no simple way to use extended characters in an html post that will work for all those who view the page. What one sees is determined by the computer setup of the one looking at the page. Without "exotic" coding, it makes little difference what the one POSTING the page does. Computers, particularly Windows ones, are REGIONALIZED. The default fonts, keyboards, and languages are different, depending on where you bought your machine. The keyboard a UK user sits in front of has different characters, in different locations, than the keyboard a US user has. A French keyboard is quite a bit different than either of those. The "whole story" on all this is supposedly laid out in the Microsoft Press manual Developing International Software. For the Second Edition even Microsoft couldn't figure out a way to have the typesetters just type the characters, so one artist made "artwork" of the individual "foreign" characters that had to be pasted in as "pictures." A first problem is that a given "font" may exist in several versions. Something called "Times New Roman" may be on one machine with only the ASCII 256 character set, on another machine in an "extended set" with about twice as many characters, and on a third machine in a "full Unicode" character set. Even the "full Unicode Times New Roman" comes in versions that are capable of right-to-left display and versions that are not. Top-to-bottom layout is another problem for some languages. In a computer, the character "glyphs" are stored in "code page conversion tables." The default code pages again are "regionalized" depending on where you are and what language you speak. It is not generally possible to have code pages loaded for "all languages" at a given time, and loading more than you actually need can bog down your RAM. You can choose which code pages are loaded in Windows in Control Panel at "Regional and Language Options." Some of the code pages in WinXP are fixed preloads and can not be changed. The fixed preloads are determined, once again, by where you are and what "language" was installed when the machine was new, or on where you bought your OS. (You probably will need to log in with Administrator privileges to make changes there.) Note that loading a "strange" code page may cause some characters to appear in a different place on your keyboard, and the locations may change if you "switch fonts," so some caution is advised. The "protocol" you set in your browser will have some effect on what characters are displayed on html pages. UTF-8 is pretty standard, but some users may have reasons for using something else. Users with older versions of Windows (Win98SE and WinME) have very limited ability to use "extended font sets." Win2K has most of the mechanisms, but may be balky about settings. WinXP can "do it all" but getting appropriate fonts and other utilities may be difficult. Much of the chrome and go-fast stripes for all this is available only as a separate add-on available only to users of a post-WinXP Server version of Windows, although most of it can be "ported" from there to individual WinXP machines. "Works for me" and "Doesn't work for me" exchanges provide very little information without a specification of: 1. Where you are (to allow a guess about how your machine is regionalized) 2. The browser encoding you use (UTF-8 usually?) 3. The "Language" set on your browzer. 4. The font used on your browser 5. The "Regional setting" you're using in Control Panel Additional differences may require knowing what browser you're using and identification of a specific code page in your machine setup, if that code page is required for what you're trying to do. John |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: s&r Date: 29 Nov 06 - 04:34 PM Like I said, load a music font. You still wont be abe to guarantee that it's readable in emails etc, but you can print pretty. I gave a link for a shareware program above Stu |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: treewind Date: 29 Nov 06 - 06:35 PM Those are not Windows specific codes, they are unicode values and quite standard and unambiguous, and the Right Way To Do It. If you have a font anywhere on your system that includes those codes your browser will use it. For any code that your browser can't match in any of the available fonts, obviously there's nothing it can do. They all work on my Linux system - but I have a lot of fonts installed, including a bunch of Windows TTFs copied over from an MS Office installation. Anahata |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 29 Nov 06 - 08:14 PM JiK Australia Win 98SE Western European (Windows) (I never had it demonstrated that UTF would be better) lang - English (cannot find a quick way to check but was prob installed as US Eng - though would prefer Aust or UK) 0 it may have been set up as Aussie English - seem to vaugely remember something like that... Can I get this Sysmusic - and should it work here? How anout trying to set up a set of 'recommended prefered browser standards' for us Mudcatters - should we try a new thread for that? or is that worth the effort at all? Robin |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: Rowan Date: 29 Nov 06 - 09:56 PM Guest Jon's post (the second in the thread) displayed correctly for me, whereas Jack Campin's displayed none of the symbols correctly. This is on a Mac running OSX (with most of the latest updates) and using Safari as the browser. Using JiK's terminology, 1. Where you are (to allow a guess about how your machine is regionalized) Australia 2. The browser encoding you use (UTF-8 usually?) Western (ISO Latin 1) 3. The "Language" set on your browzer. none specified on Safari but Australian defaults on the Mac System 4. The font used on your browser Standard Font Times 16 5. The "Regional setting" you're using in Control Panel Australian Hope this helps. Cheers, Rowan |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: JohnInKansas Date: 29 Nov 06 - 10:04 PM Robin - With Win98, it's probably not worth the effort, although you can get some improvement fairly easily. The "book" (mentioned above) is about 900 pages. Do want the whole thing? You can try Setting up Windows Internet Explorer 5, 5.5 and 6 for Multilingual and Unicode Support for some clues. That site is a bit obsolete, but may give some help. A real problem is that although Windows includes a couple of "extended fonts" there are virtually no font sets easily available that include all the characters that Unicode can describe. The next problem is that once you figure out how to do it on your machine, you have to convince the rest of the world that they must do it your way, or nobody will be able to read what you post. John |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST,Jon Date: 29 Nov 06 - 10:07 PM Seems to me the thing to do for those that can't see the "notes" (and really want to - I don't see them as being usable on a practical level [expecting people to have/install suiatble fonts for MC]) is to try to install the fonts suggested by S&R. I might try them tommorrown on Win. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: JohnInKansas Date: 29 Nov 06 - 10:13 PM Jon - YOU can install those fonts, but in order for anyone else to read what you put up using them you have to convince every possible reader to also install those fonts. John |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST,Jon Date: 29 Nov 06 - 10:18 PM John, that is why I said I don't see it being practical and tried to explain why... |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST,Jon Date: 29 Nov 06 - 10:19 PM PS. I'd not seen your 10:04 post when I was making and posted my 10:07 |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 30 Nov 06 - 04:18 AM "The "book" (mentioned above) is about 900 pages. Do want the whole thing?" Where would I put it? Oooooo, Come to think of it, that WAS a silly question to ask, wasn't it John? {:-P Well, maybe a link then if it is online... that's teh reason I didn't set up for teh Unicode anyway - the Western European (Windows) seemed to be the best compromise... I'm still serious about some sort of 'stamdard' or 'Recommended Mudcat Extensions'... |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: The Fooles Troupe Date: 30 Nov 06 - 04:28 AM John that Unicode page was useful, but it suggested that to increase the number of fonts that could be simultaenously supported, to load support for Japanese (for MSIE6) - unfortunately my attempt to do so resulted in an error that the dnld page was not available (unsupported, I suppose, means just that!). I'm gradually getting more convinced of the need to switch to Linux.... now WHICH bloody Linux? .... ;-) There's only about 50 variants.... :-) |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: The Borchester Echo Date: 30 Nov 06 - 04:32 AM Norman D I do a # with alt/3 on a Mac. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: NormanD Date: 30 Nov 06 - 04:52 AM Why , thank you ma'am. Look, it works: # I can even find € And maybe I'll even find a use for: ¢∞§¶¶•ªºπ˚∆˙©ƒ∂ßå`Ω≈ç√∫~µ≤≥ But, sadly, no b Norman |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: JennyO Date: 30 Nov 06 - 05:03 AM Well Robin, I personally am very happy with Ubuntu. It seems to be very robust, easy to use and well supported - see Ubuntu Forums . It is continually being worked on and there are regular upgrades. I have the latest one, edgy eft. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: JohnInKansas Date: 30 Nov 06 - 05:43 AM Just as an illustration of what one is up against trying to get a method that works for everybody, you can find descriptions of the available Windows keyboards (I think I count 138 versions) at Windows Keyboard Layouts. The page indicates "Internet Explorer Required" and the keyboards appear (one at a time) in a popup, so you must enable popups to see them. Each key is a separate image/frame(?) and displays the Unicode character number when you hover over it, so if you "save picture" you'll only get one key, wherever you right clicked. If you want a picture of the whole keyboard, use Alt-PrtScn and paste into an image program. John |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST,Jon Date: 30 Nov 06 - 05:46 AM I'm using Suse 10.1. There is a brief outline of some of the more popular Linux distributions here |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: Scrump Date: 30 Nov 06 - 05:57 AM As others have said, if it's for your own use you can locate and install an appropriate font that has the proper "sharp" and "flat" symbols that match your ideal representation. But if you intend to post anything here in Mudcat, or email it to someone else, use it on a webpage, etc., it's more sensible to ensure that everyone can read it, and that means using standard characters that will be read not matter what fonts the reader has on his or her PC. So you could designate the hash/pound character "#" as the sharp symbol, and lower case b "b" as the "flat" symbol, and you would know that everyone, no matter where or what PC they were using, would be able to read it. Or you could simply write the words "sharp" and "flat" longhand like that, if you don't think the "#" or "b" looks exactly 'right' to you. So for example, I can write "Bb" and "F#" and everyone can see it means "B flat" and "F sharp" respectively, providing I explain up front what I'm doing, or it's in the context of describing the chords for a song, for example. I can't see that there's any big deal. Now what I want to know is how would you represent natural? ... I'll get me coat :-) |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST,Jon Date: 30 Nov 06 - 06:01 AM OH and if you want a quick look at Linux (and perhaps a lot more) Damn Small Linux is worth a look. It's quite impressive what they can do with just 50Mb |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: JohnInKansas Date: 30 Nov 06 - 06:26 AM Foolestroupe - I believe last I heard you're still using Win98SE. Pure and simple, Win98 does not support Unicode. (WinME, surprisingly, is even worse.) There are some workarounds that will let you use lots more characters, but they're not really "using Unicode." The oldest Windows version with full Unicode support built into the OS is Win2K, and it's nearing obsolete/unsupported status. WinXP has all the bells and whistles, but some of them are difficult to get. Unicode (basic) uses 16 bits to represent a character, and Win98 only accomodates 8 bit characters in the OS. Win98 can use a "translation" table to move/map character numbers into an 8-bit "page" so that the glyphs for higher numbered characters get printed/displayed, but that's only approximating "real Unicode." The "music fonts" mentioned by several people generally are of this kind. The glyph that the "page" presents in response to an 8-bit character number that would otherwise be a normal text character is a "music symbol" but the font IS NOT A UNICODE FONT, even though it's possible to translate a Unicode character number to a position on the page. Rev 2 of the Unicode standard added "surrogate pages" since the 65,536 characters that can be separately identified by 16-bit character numbers aren't enough for some languages. TWO 16-bit numbers are used for characters from the "surrogate pages" to represent each character. Win2K or WinXP either can mostly handle the DWORD characters, although WinXP has a "fuller set" in default setups. The "music glyphs" in Unicode generally are in the "surrogate page" range. A more recent "Unicodish" development is the new Chinese character encoding schema GB 18030. In this system, many characters require FOUR 16-bit numbers (allowing 1.6 million characters) to specify an individual character. Both Win2K and WinXP can be "fixed" to handle these, but "it ain't easy and it ain't free." This is not (yet) part of the Unicode standard, but is required for all new machines sold in China. (Win98 is grandfathered and still permitted, WinME IS NOT.) Try Dr International at Microsoft for more information. I'd suggest starting with some of the early "columns." These are aimed at people writing software, so you may be interested although most here may consider them "too techie." (These columns date back to when Win2K was new, so some of them may be "oldish" for WinXP. They appear to have been written mostly after Win98 was declared dead.) John |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST,Jon Date: 30 Nov 06 - 06:37 AM Just another thought, FT. If you are running old kit as well as 98, DSL linux might be even more worth a look as it says it will run on a 486DX with 16Mb RAM - not at all bad for a current O/S. I'm not sure of the requirements for SUSE but I'm on 64 bit versions anyway. Have been for a couple of years now. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST,Jon Date: 30 Nov 06 - 06:40 AM Thinking about it though. I'd think the DSL minimum specs are for a text only (yes you can do that with Linux - don't have to have graphics if you don't need them) install. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST,clockwatcher Date: 30 Nov 06 - 07:53 AM OK, I started this thread and a right can of worms it turned out to be for a non-techie like me. Fortunately I am not trying to post on the net, just produce a fair copy document for printing, framing and presentation. So if I can download a font which has got the flat symbol in it, I should be able to print with it, right ? Thanks for everyone's help, and don't stop, it's all fascinating. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: JennyO Date: 30 Nov 06 - 08:50 AM Don't worry, we won't. We enjoy our cans of worms. I find it all fascinating too. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: GUEST,Jon Date: 30 Nov 06 - 10:15 AM Yep, clockwatcher, install a suitable font for your system and you should be OK. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: Scrump Date: 30 Nov 06 - 11:14 AM The underscore character _ is the flattest symbol I know ... I'll get me coat. |
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Subject: RE: Tech: Flat symbol ??? From: JohnInKansas Date: 30 Nov 06 - 12:33 PM Theres underscore and unnderscore or redunderscore (???) John |
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