Music fonts / symbols

[Mario]

I don’t think this subject has cropped up before – apologies if it has.

Are there good websites to download music fonts and symbols (sharps, flats, naturals, G, F & C Clefs, ff, ppp, hairpins, etc)?

I’ve only found www.fontspace.com, which is probably sufficient for my needs (Music Theory Grade 5).

I also have Sibelius. I cannot copy fonts from there to paste into Word or Excel, can I?

Thanks in advance,

Mario

[Boilk]

I don’t think this subject has cropped up before – apologies if it has.

Are there good websites to download music fonts and symbols (sharps, flats, naturals, G, F & C Clefs, ff, ppp, hairpins, etc)?

Composer Matthew Hindson has a useful free music fonts page on his website, Mac and Windows links too!

[Mario]

Composer Matthew Hindson has a useful free music fonts page on his website, Mac and Windows links too!

Boilk,

Thanks a million! Just waiting for the Man Utd game to come on, so I'll explore further later, thank you!

Best wishes,

Mario

[Mario]

Boilk,

Thanks a million! Just waiting for the Man Utd game to come on, so I'll explore further later, thank you!

Best wishes,

Mario

Don't know why I bothered really...

Anyway, thanks again Boilk, I will look at your link and see what else I can download.

Looks pretty useful, so thanks again.

Mario

[Dave2002]

An interesting question, and thanks for the links to some interesting fonts and tools mentioned so far.

I'd be surprised if you can't do what you want to do with Sibelius. I have tried to use MuseScore, and exported to a graphics format (a one shot test - to .svg) and then imported back into Open Office. That worked OK. It should work with Sibelius too. I can try other methods, but I thought just one test to show feasiblity would suffice for the moment.

I don't see why that shouldn't work with other formats, and other word processors. Check if your copy of Sibelius has an export option.

Also, you could try asking on the Musescore community forum for more advice. I know that there are plans to update the music fonts for the next (but one - skipping over the 3.6 update) verions - Musescore 4, though that is about 8-10 months away. There has been discussion about what fonts to use. You could try writing directly to Martin Keary - aka Tantacrul - as he seems to be knowledgeable about such things, and is now quite heavily involved with Musescore development.

[Mario]

An interesting question, and thanks for the links to some intereting fonts and tools mentioned so far.

I'd be surprised if you can't do what you want to do with Sibelius. I have tried to use MuseScore, and exported to a graphics format (a one shot test - to .svg) and then imported back into Open Office. That worked OK. It should work with Sibelius too. I can try other methods, but I thought just one test to show feasiblity would suffice for the moment.

I don't see why that shouldn't work with other formats, and other word processors. Check if your copy of Sibelius has an export option.

Also, you could try asking on the Musescore community forum for more advice. I know that there are plans to update the music fonts for the next (but one - skipping over the 3.6 update) verions - Musescore 4, though that is about 8-10 months away. There has been discussion about what fonts to use. You could try writing directly to Martin Keary - aka Tantacrul - as he seems to be knowledgeable about such things, and is now quite heavily involved with Musescore development.

To be honest, I’ve been waiting for a reply from you, as I’ve noticed in the past you’ve asked many questions (and seemed quite knowledgeable and experienced) about various music writing software programmes.

Yes, I too thought Boilk’s response was useful, and I’m exploring that.

Your own response needs some careful thought from me, but I’ll give it a shot.

I know nothing about Musescore, but I’m hoping that Sibelius will be sufficient for my (limited) means.

Really grateful for your reply,

Mario

[Dave2002]

While I would still recommend that you at least download Musescore as one extra tool in your armoury, and I think a good one to have as an extra, you should be able to do what you want in Sibelius. For most purposes I believe that Sibelius is generally considered better, but that doesn't mean it'll do everything.

See https://musescore.org/en/download for Musescore, though note that Musescore.com is a slightly different site from musescore.org. It's a bit complicated to explain, but one has the free to download music program, the other has a community forum and a collection of music. You can send files to and from Sibelius using various formats, such as MusicXml.

To just do the fairly simple graphics clips directly in Sibelius you can follow the instructions here - https://www.scoringnotes.com/tips/ex...us-in-seconds/ - though I've not tested those as I don't currently have a working version of Sibelius.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

You can copy the Sibelius fonts into Word, etc., using the appropriate codes.

Edit - sorry. Dave beat me to it.

[Mario]

You can copy the Sibelius fonts into Word, etc., using the appropriate codes.

Edit - sorry. Dave beat me to it.

EA, I’m confused by your “using the appropriate codes” comment re Sibelius.

May I please explain?

I’m practising my cadences, so let’s keep it simple for my sake.

Perfect cadence, V – I, in Eb Maj.

Rules are bass goes down (or up), so Bb – Eb

Leading note in soprano up to tonic, so D – Eb

Common notes, say in tenor, so Bb – Bb,

Finally remaining notes in alto, so F – G.

All fine, but in other cadences, we might need a natural for a leading note.

A sharp (#), or flat (b) is easy on a keyboard. But how do I borrow the natural sign from Sibelius?

Is this possible, and is there a code?

Dave’s very helpful link to scoring notes is good for copying bars and/or passages, but can I copy a simple letter or direction, say ff, or ppp, or even ˂ into Word?

Thanks,

Mario

[esmondo]

If you've got Sibelius installed then your system will have the music fonts it uses (eg. Helsinki) installed, ready for use by other applications. So if you're a Windows user and you want (say) a treble clef in your Word document you could run the Character Map program, choose Helsinki, find the symbol you're after and copy+paste it. But bear in mind that the treble clef won't display properly if you send the Word file to someone who doesn't have that font installed.

[Mario]

If you've got Sibelius installed then your system will have the music fonts it uses (eg. Helsinki) installed, ready for use by other applications. So if you're a Windows user and you want (say) a treble clef in your Word document you could run the Character Map program, choose Helsinki, find the symbol you're after and copy+paste it. But bear in mind that the treble clef won't display properly if you send the Word file to someone who doesn't have that font installed.

Marvellous isn’t it?

I’ve had Sibelius installed for around 20 years, but only recently discovered, thanks to you, music fonts already installed in Word!

I think this will make my journey towards Music Theory Grade 6 somewhat easier.

Thanks a million!

Best wishes,

Mario

[Richard Barrett]

If you've got Sibelius installed then your system will have the music fonts it uses (eg. Helsinki) installed, ready for use by other applications. So if you're a Windows user and you want (say) a treble clef in your Word document you could run the Character Map program, choose Helsinki, find the symbol you're after and copy+paste it. But bear in mind that the treble clef won't display properly if you send the Word file to someone who doesn't have that font installed.

Exactly. Similar considerations apply to Mac OS of course. If you need to send the resulting document to anyone else it would be best to re-save it as a pdf. Although when I have to put bits of musical notation into a Word document (which is quite often) my preferred method is to make them up in Sibelius, magnify them to fill the screen, make a screenshot and then drag the resulting jpg document into Word, where it can be moved around and resized as necessary. You can see this technique in action in the introductory pages to this score:

https://richardbarrettmusic.com/s141%20entoptic%20v1.2.pdf

[Dave2002]

EA, I’m confused by your “using the appropriate codes” comment re Sibelius.

May I please explain?

I’m practising my cadences, so let’s keep it simple for my sake.

Perfect cadence, V – I, in Eb Maj.

Rules are bass goes down (or up), so Bb – Eb

Leading note in soprano up to tonic, so D – Eb

Common notes, say in tenor, so Bb – Bb,

Finally remaining notes in alto, so F – G.

Try this




That was done in MuseScore. It can be transposed easily to any key - using the Transpose option in that program. Then do a screen dump, and extract the relevant part of the image as a jpg or png file, which can be embedded in Word. Ah you might have preferred the B flat to be in the tenor, with the F-G in the alto - but that's easy enough to fix.

Putting dynamics in is also easy. You can do pretty much the same in Sibelius.

You can get Musescore to output (Export) to png, svg or pdf formats including the graphics. I just chose to do the screen dump method today. If you have a version of Word which can import PDFs you might be able to use that format.

[Mario]

You seem to be quite impressed with Musescore - do you prefer it to Sibelius?

Mario

[Dave2002]

You seem to be quite impressed with Musescore - do you prefer it to Sibelius?

Musescore is free. I think there are features of Sibelius which are better, but there is quite a lot of similarity between the programs. MuseScore is likely to improve with a new version coming out probably towards the end of 2021.

If you have Sibelius stick with it, though there’s nothing to stop you downloading and running MuseScore as well.

Richard’s response, based on Sibelius, Msg 12, is pretty much the same procedure using that tool instead.