Symbols in lyric text

2012-05-14 12:58 am

I sing in a choir. For individual practice, I enter our music into Noteworthy Composer and distribute it to the choir members for use in the viewer. We are presently working on a work in French. I would like to enter on a second line of lyrics, a pronunciation guide using the International Phonetic Alphabet. I found a true type font for the IPA. I used MS Word to enter the pronunciation guide. In Noteworthy Composer, I assigned the appropriate Font to the Staff Lyric. I then pasted the text from the Word document into the Lyrics word processor. When the text is first put into the Lyrics, all the symbols appear. When I hit OK to enter the Lyrics into the music, most of the symbols are represented by "?". In other words, the symbols have been lost.

Any help with my problem?

Re: Symbols in lyric text

Reply #1 – 2012-05-14 07:14 am

I expect that this problem is to do with Unicode fonts. The font you used is probably unicode.

If you can find a true-type font where the characters you require are all below character 255, then that font will work as required. Check the characters using the Windows Character mapper.

It map help when looking at the windows character map to click on advanced options and make sure that you are looking at something other than Unicode Character set, for example Windows Western. The code for the character is often in hexadecimal.
This instead of going from 1 to 10 (as in decimal), this increases from 1 to F in the following way :
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F and then goes 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1A, 1B and so on. So the characters you need to use in NoteWorthy are from 0 through to FF. (0000 to 00FF). If you see a character with a code that is larger than this, then NoteWorthy will not be able to use it.

So to show you an easy example, using the Windows character mapper, select advanced and then Windows western.
Then select the font Aerial. You will see that you have characters from code 21 through to FF. If you now change to Unicode, you will see that the range is much larger, from 21 through to FFFC. It is only the range 21 to FF that NoteWorthy can understand.

Some work was undertaken during the last beta series to try and make NoteWorthy Unicode compatible but this ran into problems and so it didn't happen. I expect another attempt may be made for the next major version.

A suggestion for you is to prepare your work leaving a second line ready for your phonetic lyrics and then, for each page, create an emf file (Print Preview copy).
You can then load these pages into Word. Once in Word, You can put a text box over the second lyric line (formatted to to remove the outline).
In that text box, you will be able to type the appropriate unicode lyrics.

Please note that I am not saying that this is an easy solution, it's just a solution you may want to experiment with.

Roll on a unicode compatible version of NoteWorthy!

Re: Symbols in lyric text

Reply #2 – 2012-05-14 09:50 am

NWC 2.5 does not support Unicode.
There are legacy (non Unicode) IPA fonts in silipa93.zip, available from: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=encore-ipa-download

NWC 2.5 only allows one font to be used for lyrics. Lyrics can be faked to some extent with Text items, but it is impossible to get the hyphens between syllables to center properly.

If you can do without the hyphens in the IPA "lyrics" or you can tolerate the hyphens being off-center, you might try this:

Do the french lyrics normally
Install one of the IPA fonts from the above download.
Define one of the user fonts as the installed IPA font.
Enter the IPA equivalent to the french as text (below the french.)

There will be spacing issues. You may need to pad the french lyrics with extra spaces or use the Spacer Command. I would advise against using 'Preserve Width'.

Re: Symbols in lyric text

Reply #3 – 2012-05-14 09:19 pm

Yes, the font I use is a unicode font. Thanks for the suggestions.