Skip to main content ↑ ↓
Topic: Braces (Read 2732 times) previous topic - next topic

Braces

Dear users,
I have three messages which I am posting differently, so pardon me when you see that my name keeps coming back, thanks. Here is my first question:Is there a place I can get various braces that I can add to NWC as additional fonts? And if/when I do, how would I get them in place at the beginning of a piece since the insertion point does not go outside the system?

Re: Braces

Reply #1 –
Right off the top of my head, I don't know of a mostly-braces font. I have seen something of the sort floating around the Internet, but it was not related to music. I don't recall where.

If you do find the kind of brace you want, you cannot place it as text in front of the staves (as you discovered). But what you can do is copy your mjusic to metafiles using Print Preview > Copy. A metafile can be placed in a word processor document. There, you can add anything you like as a free-floating object not connected to the metafile, so you can position it in front of the staves (or wherever the document allows you to put things). You can also scale to fit.

Re: Braces

Reply #2 –
You can indeed place objects outside of the system, for instance before the left edge of the staff. The trick is to follow your object (e.g. braces, text, whatever) with a string of spaces, and set justification to "right", and alignment as appropriate for your situation ("At next note/bar" is usually the most stable, IMHO).

Similarly, objects can be placed beyond the right edge of the staff by preceding it with a string of spaces, and using left justification.

Note that this requires that your font indeed have a whitespace in it. This means that the NWCV15.ttf font and others like it cannot be used for this purpose.

Also be careful that your margins are set conservatively. If they're not, the object(s) will be blithely placed where you put them, but may fall outside of your printer's printable area.

Re: Braces

Reply #3 –
Fred, you just taught me something new.