Character map for MScore fonts?

• Mar 13, 2015 - 22:34

Is there anywhere a visible character map for the special fonts in MuseScore that do not show up in the Windows Character Map app?

I'm looking for something that shows the equivalency between a normal keycode and the result in the MScore fonts.

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• Mar 13, 2015 - 22:59

Is there a reaosn you are looking for this?

If it's just to satisfy curiosity, you can go to GitHub and download the fonts themselves from the MuseScore project folders.

If it's because you wish to add symbols from one of the ntoation fonts to your document, the supported way to do that is to add them from the Symbols palette (press "Z" to display). If there are particular symbols you expect to need often, you can add Ctrl+Shift+drag them to a custom palette if you first create a workspace with the "+" button at the bottom of the palette.

Adding symbols this way should work no matter what font you are using otherwise. MuseScore uses special "\" tags to represent the symbols so they can be written and read portably and in a font-independent manner. Trying to trick MuseScore into displaying characters from the notation fonts by switching to that font and inserting character codes directly is not likely to end well.

BTW, there are also a handful of shortcuts you can use as well, that work regardless of font:

Ctrl+Shift+B, Ctrl+Shift+#, Ctrl+Shift+h for flat, sharp, natural
Ctrl+Shift+letter for the the f, m, n, p, r, s, and z used in dynamics

Note tht chord symbols are totally different; yu just enter "b" and "#" for flat and sharp and they are translated automatically. Similarly for other symbols.

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• Mar 13, 2015 - 23:24

If I ask a question it is not because of idle curiosity, it is because I can't find the answer in the documentation and i need to do something with MuseScore.

The reason I am looking into this is because I wish to create a tempo text with notation in it.

I want to write something like "quarter note equals dotted quarter note" and then use the properties of that text to create the appropriate new BPM setting.

I'm looking at the Symbols palette right now. It contains no conventional notation symbols and I find that dragging one of the symbols that is there does not add it to my piece of tempo text anyway.

V 2.0 has shown pieces of text with quarter note symbols from those MScore fonts. If I knew the correct keypresses to make those symbols I could do that in v 1.3

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• Mar 13, 2015 - 23:33

Knowing the context of you question makes it much easier to answer.

The note symbols are found in the text symbols palette, which comes up when you press F2 or click the icon at the far left of the text toolbar. So that is how tempo markings are created. This is documented in the Handbook at http://musescore.org/en/node/36066 and the links given within.

BTW, that's the palette I actually meant when I erroneously wrote about the "Z" symbols palette above, sorry for mlsleading. But the symbols palette *does* contain conventional notation symbols - tons of them, in fact. Every single one used in MuseScore and hundreds that aren't. You just need to scroll around until you find them. Emmentaler is a much smaller font than Bravura, so if you are looking for something conventional, you can probably find it there more easily.

But again, what you actually want is the F2 text symbols palette. This is available in both 1.3 and 2.0. Again, you don't want to do it using charcater codes. Even if you knew the proper codes to use in 1.3, they aren't the same in 2.0, so you'd probably just create scores that don't display properly in 2.0. Don't use character codes - use the support methods of adding symbols and save yourself a lot of grief.

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• Nov 21, 2015 - 23:26

But is there a map of characters/glyphs to unicode values, hex or decimal? Does it exist?

It would be useful. I have been browsing the mscore.sfd file in FontForge, and the characters are all over the place. The quantity of available characters in unicode is large, and the quantity of characters in the font is small, so the map is sparsely populated and it's clumsy locating specific characters. A consolidated list would definitely be helpful to me in the process of trying to code for SVG Export, especially since I can't use the old v1 SVG Export to get the character codes because, as you say, they've changed in v2.

It's not necessary for me to accomplish what I'm attempting, but it would save me some ongoing hassle if it already exists. If it doesn't exist, I'll probably create one, at least for the characters/glyphs I need. I'll post it, maybe git it so others can add until there is a complete list. What would be the proper file format for such a thing? HTML? Plain text won't cut it, the glyph itself needs to be visible, not just some text-based name or description.

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• Nov 22, 2015 - 00:48

What you are describing - the mapping between glyphs and cde points in the music fonts - is defined by the new SMuFL standard, which we follow. SMuFL is indeed the reason the code points have changed from 1.3 to 2.0. See www.smufl.org for more on this standard, including the spec itself as a downloadable PDF. It should answer your questions.

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• Nov 22, 2015 - 15:04

Thanks, that helps. I'm in the process of trying to figure out how v1.3 generated SVG text elements with the proper characters. I couldn't find the v1.3 source (until just now someone pointed out a zip file), so I was fishing elsewhere.
I think this PDF character map will be useful for debugging purposes. I also see that v1.3 stuck the actual character in the SVG, and I think it might be safer/better to generate it as an XML element, like &\#xE050; which is the MScore font's character code for Treble Clef (ignore the backslash character between the & and the #, it was the only way I could get the element text to display almost properly).

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