The problem of resizing text containing Flat symbol

• Jan 9, 2013 - 06:55

The problem of resizing text containing a flat symbol is common to all DTP programs as well.
It depends on which font is being used.
Strangely, after all the time the symbol has been used in a text flow, very few conventional fonts contain the flat symbol (and the hash symbol is a poor replacement for a sharp).
It is even stranger considering that the modern Open Type fonts contain thousands of slots for every conceivable symbol, ranging from currency in Swahili to every imaginable symbol, almost none give the glyph.
The available Unicode slots can be seen at:
http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D100.pdf

The fonts designed for musical typesetting (like Opus, Helsinki or Sonata) were not designed for text flow and often have strange spacing dimensions above and below the baseline, which in turn distort the whole line in which they are placed.
If you run some text including the flat glyph in a typographic program like InDesign (which is produced to handle the really fine details like this) you can see the distortion immediately.
Sometimes these music fonts have 'text' version. But even some of these don't oblige.

I suspect that MuseScore defaults to one of the music glyph sets.
My suggestion is to use a text form.
From memory, I think MS Sans Serif contains one.

Later .... I have just stumbled across this discussion, where clearly some developers are thinking about it.
http://musescore.org/en/node/17748

Sorry to have rambled on.
Alan


Comments

Yes, as that discussion shows, the prloblem is more or less solved for 2.0. Might not be completely implemented yet (I have no idea), but MuseScore will incldue its own text fonts and these will use the Unicode code points. So this problem should go away. Meanwhile, I either use "b" and "#" when I want something quick and easy, or deal with bad resizing.

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