Sure Joe, but what good does it do when posting a "musical note" in in-line text is of no help toward posting a tune.

If really needed, any number of us could likely find a character icon representation of a "limp dick lackamuckala" but you'd probably be the only one who'd play with it and it would be useless to the rest of us. (And you'd have to tell us what one looks like, I suppose.)

There are no musical symbols in Unicode, including the note characters, that are of any practical use for posting a musical score. The few included are in there only so that people can insert them into in-line text in order to talk about the terms they represent.

Any character that's not a Unicode character requires an additional font that both the person posting and the person reading the post must have on their individual computers.

I can see many of the "cute" symbols that Bill D posts, since I have over 450 TrueType fonts and around 100 others on my machine, including several music fonts from scoring programs; but lots of others probably won't be able to "read" them.

The real limitation for our people here, and something that would significantly clean up some of what people do by "kludge"^**1 methods, is the absence of an "array" function in the Unicode Standards, since it would permit "book form" posting of lyrics with chords.

^**1 Note that I've used the UK form "kludge" (rhymes with fudge) that's a generally derogatory description of a way of doing something badly by using the wrong methods and equipment. This is not to be confused with the US form "kluge" (rhymes with huge) that describes converting methods and equipment intended for other uses to exactly and elegantly obtain the intended result.

So far as I've found, there is no "array" function in Unicode, or it was so complex that I've forgotten where I saw it.

Although you can use tables to put chords over words with reasonable alignment, that's an incredibly cumbersome method.

People use a variety of methods of writing a lyric with chords in-line or raised above the line before or after the word (or the initial character of the word) where a particular chord begins, but the variation in methods forces those who prefer a different method to "study" the posts to see exactly what is intended, and it's difficult to guess what handling might be used if the chord changes within a syllable.

You can also use a monospaced font and the <pre> tag, but it takes considerable trial and error to control the built-in line breaks before and after the post. I normally would use that method and suppress my inclination to want it to "look nice," but it's not wholly satisfying.

If you copy the appropriate bits that follow into Word and follow the keystrokes you should see what I mean. You may have to type the F⁶ and G⁷ rather than pasting since I used html coding for the post here:

In Word, where an array function is defined, I can type:

"eq \a \al (F⁶,Chest-nuts )" – omit the quotes – and then highlight the whole string and hit Ctl-F9. The F9 puts what was highlighted between a pair of slightly "funny" but very special "{ }" curly braces. With the cursor "in the braces" when I hit F9 again I get "Chest-nuts" with the F⁶ chord directly above the C.

Repeat for the next chord:

eq \a \al (G⁷,roast-ing on an )

- - etc, &etc for "The Christmas Song" in the "standard" form recognized by just about everybody who plays.

  F6        G7 
  Chestnuts Roasting on an ...

It gets really easy when you've done a few dozen lyric sheets in Word. All you need to remember is that you're using an "equation field" – the "eq" - with type "array" – the "\a" - with entries "aligned left" – the "\al." Put the chord first and then the lyric that goes with that chord, separated by a comma, in parentheses. Highlight and Ctl-F9 to actually turn it into a field, and F9 to "show the value of the field."

I usually "Ctl-F9" first and then type rest of it inside the braces, but it works either way.

I include the method here since it may be useful to someone who wants to type and print lyric sheets "at home" that look great. It doesn't work in html, or at least I haven't found a way to work it.

John