Chord-Symbols: 'sqares' instead of #m7 - maybe problem with font MuseJazz?

• Oct 22, 2013 - 11:20

Dear MuseScorer,
I am currently struggling with the display of chord-symbols within MuseScore on my new Win8-Laptop: Instead of "F#m7" (i.e. popular German version of "F#mi7") MuseScore displays just "F□□□" (or prints out "F "), a "C#m7" is displayed as "C□□□" (and printed as "C "), etc. Any font character like "#" , "m" or "7" is simply replaced by a silly □square.

As a painting could speak more than a thousand words see this Screenshot here .

I use the Chord-Style "cchordsnrb.xml", that - to my best knowledge - refers to the font "MuseJazz". A view at the 'character map' of the MuseJazz font at Win8 reveals, that even within this font-file some characters were missing and replaced by a square-symbol respectively: no #, no numerals, only blank square-symbols. Even a restart didn't help, neither a restart of MuseScore, nor a complete Win8 restart.

Anyone an idea, how I could remedy that?
Thanks in advance, nic-key…

PS: see German version of this request here //musescore.org/de/node/23255


Comments

Please try this:
In MuseScore, go to menu item: Plugins / Lead Sheet / Create Chord Chart and open the cchordsnrb.xml style (or any other style) to see if the chords display correctly.

See the 2 attachments:
The first is a .png image of the created chord chart.
The second is the actual Musescore .mscz file generated by the plugin.

Regards.

Attachment Size
chords screenshot.PNG 59.05 KB
chords.mscz 3.14 KB

I suspect your problem is that you have an old version of MuseJazz installed. You shouldn't have *any* version of that font installed - it's normally compiled into the program. I guess maybe you downloaded the font directly from the source distribution at some point and installed it manually? MuseScore will use an installed version in preference to the compiled-in version. So remove your installation of MuseJazz, restart MuseScore, and try again.

But do note that you cannot use "m" as the abbreviation for minor with cchords_nrb.xml. Each chord description file defines a very specific set of chord symbols it recognizes, and "nrb" uses "ma" and "mi". If you want to use "m" for minor, you need to use a style that uses that symbol. I believe stdchords.xml does, and then you could change the font to MuseJazz yourself. Or you could create your own customized copy of cchords_nrb where you replace "mi" with "m" in the lines that define parse_minor and display_minor.

When you enter an unrecognized chord, MuseScore won't even try to use the sharp or flat signs - it will render the chord exactly as you typed it, with the letter "b" instead of a flat sign, and the regular hash symbol "#" instead of a sharp sign. It also won't transpose, etc, and will generally just look awkward next to the correctly recognized & rendered chord symbols.

For 2.0, all this nonsense will go away. No more pre-defined sets of chords you have enter exactly as expected in order to get them recognized & rendered correctly. You'll be able to type more or less what you want (within reason) and MuseScore should recognize and render it well.

In reply to by Marc Sabatella

Thanks, Marc, you're great!

But all apart from this: Great news to hear news about v2.0 and new chord features. I'm longing for it :-) Is it already implemented in a nighly build? I'll try it out...

1.) Gosh, I should have come across this point on my own - sorry #-/ . As I've had some problems with my MuseScore installation, I separately downloaded the MuseJazz fonts from another source and manually installed it afterwards on Win8. I actually forgot about it...

2.) I already modified the "cchords_nrb.xml" manually regarding the "mi" to the variant and more common German spelling "m" for minor. Forgot to mention...

Thanks and greetings from Germany
nic-key!

In reply to by nic-key.de

Yes, the chord symbol facility is there ready to be tested in nightly builds. The default settings for new scores uses the standard text font (an open source replacement for Times New Roman) and no special superscripting or other formattings. You can change the font used in Style / Text / Chordname, but it will still be "plain" formatting.

In order to get the fancy jazz formatting, change to the "Jazz" style in Style / General / Chordnames. This automatically changes to MuseJazz font but also does all sorts of superscripting and other formatting. You also have the option here of using one of the old chord description files if you have one you prefer. The same dialog contains options to use German or French/Italian note naming or to make minor & diminished chords lower case. The distance of chordnames above the staff is now also controlled here. The *size* of chord symbols is controlled in Style / Text / Chordname as it always has. The fact that some things are under General and others under Text is kind of unfortunate and I suppose subject to change, but I don't have a better idea right now.

There is also a Style / Chord dialog but that may go away. It provides a graphical way to tweak the formatting of individual chords. It only "sort of" works, though, as far as I can tell.

Anyhow, I hope you like the new parsing/rendering system. It understands m, mi, min, or - as abbreviations for minor; M, Ma, ma, Maj, maj for major as well as t or ^ to use a triangle; you can use parens around alterations or not, list alterations in any order, use "sus" or "sus4" interchangeably, etc. See http://musescore.org/en/node/21202

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