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Topic: Placing ornaments, symbols, and graphics in NWC file. (Read 18775 times) previous topic - next topic

Placing ornaments, symbols, and graphics in NWC file.

NWC can place virtually any True Type font character into a NWC file.

To do this, you must install the desired font in your system. Then, choose it as a "user font" in page setup within NWC. Using the NWC text editor, you can place one or more characters from the font.

The NWC Scriptorium has a number of fonts containing musical ornaments, such as glissando, mordent, frets. But you can place characters unrelated to the music, if you wish. For example, you can browse the Internet for free fonts with holiday and ethnic symbols. Look in fonts such as Webdings, Wingdings, and Monotype Sorts for symbols that you already have. You may also need to use this technique if you are placing letters with accented characters or special punctuation.

Many font characters do not correspond to the computer keyboard. It is possible to specify such characters by numerical coding, but the easiest way is to use a character map utility. You have a character map in the "Accessories" programs that came with Windows. MS Word has a built-in character map (for placing symbols). You can use a third-party character map, such as the free "Typecase" if you prefer visibly larger characters.

In general, a character map works this way: You choose the font you wish to use. A grid will appear, containing all of the characters in that font (not including the extended sets of Open Type Unicode fonts). To select a character, click it, and it will be copied to the clipboard. Some character maps first create an internal buffer, which must then be transferred to the clipboard. You can copy several characters together.

From the clipboard, paste the characters into the destination. Keep in mind that you are pasting character codes, not the characters themselves. The characters will appear in the font specified in the destination program.

In the case of the NWC text editor, pasted characters will appear in a text-face font (Times) even if the user font is something else. In other words, even if your user font is Greek or Russian, the pasted characters will be Latin. But when you close the NWC text editor, the correct Greek or Russian characters will show in the music, and will print.

Re: Placing ornaments, symbols, and graphics in NWC file.

Reply #1 –
Robert, I have been doing this for texts in the Greek & Cyrillic alphabets for as long as I have had NWC, which must be going on seven years now. What I would really like, however, is to be able to use Unicode fonts. As you know, this will produce a row of question marks in place of text with NWC as it now is. Any chance that NWC will be improved to support Unicode?

Stephen

Re: Placing ornaments, symbols, and graphics in NWC file.

Reply #2 –
Is there any way that one can put up or import a guitar chord grid which is sometimes
useful if one wishes to show a particular chord or is this a feature that one could expect
from NWC2, me being NWCI.75.Or is this pushing things a bit .At this point I have not
looked under Scriptorium as yet .This feature occured to me on the referal to frets above.

Re: Placing ornaments, symbols, and graphics in NWC file.

Reply #3 –
Quote
Insert Quote
Is there any way that one can put up or import a guitar chord grid which is sometimes
useful if one wishes to show a particular chord or is this a feature that one could expect
from NWC2, me being NWCI.75.Or is this pushing things a bit .At this point I have not
looked under Scriptorium as yet .This feature occured to me on the referal to frets above.

http://nwc-scriptorium.org/helpful.html#Fonts

I don't know if this will work or not, but it says:

fretqwik.zip version 4 A font from Robert Allgeyer for creating guitar tablature diagrams. Virtually any fret diagram can be created, and used as text within NWC or anywhere.

Quote
Any chance that NWC will be improved to support Unicode? 

Go to http://nwc-scriptorium.org/helpful.html#Fonts for Times New Roman Unicode - these fonts contain many more international characters, and are needed to properly display lyrics and other text in some middle-Eastern ethnic NWC files. They can safely replace your existing fonts, or rename them so that you can install/uninstall them as needed. Warning: large file (680k).

Re: Placing ornaments, symbols, and graphics in NWC file.

Reply #4 –
G'day Timoteus,
I can agree with David RE: FretQwik.

I've used it and it's very, very good.

The only real caveat with it is that you must know how the chord is to be constructed as you place all elements manually.

Without any doubt, Typecase is the tool for selecting the characters to create the chords - The way Robert has created the font, Typecase's presentation of it makes the construction phase almost intuitive.  He clearly put a lot of thought into it.
I plays 'Bones, crumpets, coronets, floosgals, youfonymums 'n tubies.

Re: Placing ornaments, symbols, and graphics in NWC file.

Reply #5 –
Thanks David and Lawrie
I have just downloaded it and I know it will keep these brain cells busy for some time
to come .