Music fonts

[Linda Fox]

I'm trying to create some simple music theory quizzes for my young
pupils to do on the computer. Rather maddeningly, all quiz-making
software, whether it's free or whether it costs �100, has the same two
drawbacks for me:

1. Although they will allow you to import pictures, they'll only allow
one at a time and that only in the question, not in the (multiple
choice) answers

and 2. Where they will allow you to specify the font (and they don't
all) you can only use one for everything and not change it for the answers.

Does anyone know of a music font which will also produce a full alphabet
of letters? Alternatively a "normal" alphabetical font which permits
graphic symbols (possibly by use of AltGr?) including music notes? And a
real flat rather than a letter b would be nice

Then I'll be able to go a bit beyond "which kind of note fits six times
into a dotted minim?"

I have made some in the past using Powerpoint, but I don't know any way
of totting up their scores, only saying if they were right or wrong at
the time. (Maybe I just need some more advanced Ppt tutorials)

any ideas?

Linda ff

[ph...@cam.ac.uk]

In article <k3hbn.36777$Ym4....@text.news.virginmedia.com>,
Linda Fox <lind...@ntlworld.com> writes:

>Does anyone know of a music font which will also produce a full alphabet
>of letters? Alternatively a "normal" alphabetical font which permits
>graphic symbols (possibly by use of AltGr?) including music notes? And a
>real flat rather than a letter b would be nice

The PostScript font that comes with my music typesetting software (see
http://www.quercite.com/pmw.html) should be capable of being used like
any other font. It should be possible to mix it with conventional text
fonts - just like you can mix italic fonts with bold fonts, etc. I
certainly do this in the manual for the software.

However, I am using different software to you for the text processing,
so I have no idea whether it would work for you. But the good news is
that this is all free. You probably won't be interested in the software
(I develop on Linux, and it's released as source), but you can download
the whole package from that web site and extract the font. Or, if you
like, I can email you just the font file and a document that describes
the musical characters that it contains. For text processing purposes
you will also need to install the "fontmetrics" file, which contains the
sizes of all the characters.

Philip

--
Philip Hazel
Cambridge, England

[Richard Robinson]

Linda Fox said:
> I'm trying to create some simple music theory quizzes for my young
> pupils to do on the computer. Rather maddeningly, all quiz-making
> software, whether it's free or whether it costs £100, has the same two
> drawbacks for me:
>
> 1. Although they will allow you to import pictures, they'll only allow
> one at a time and that only in the question, not in the (multiple
> choice) answers
>
> and 2. Where they will allow you to specify the font (and they don't
> all) you can only use one for everything and not change it for the answers.
>
> Does anyone know of a music font which will also produce a full alphabet
> of letters? Alternatively a "normal" alphabetical font which permits
> graphic symbols (possibly by use of AltGr?) including music notes? And a
> real flat rather than a letter b would be nice
>
> Then I'll be able to go a bit beyond "which kind of note fits six times
> into a dotted minim?"

There are schemes that allow you to write music using only the alphabetic
symbols, & mix this with ordinary text on the same page, producing EPS which
you could maybe use as a 'picture' ? ABC would be one,
http://abcnotation.com/ , and Lilypond, http://lilypond.org/ , and probably
others.

--
Richard Robinson
"The whole plan hinged upon the natural curiosity of potatoes" - S. Lem

My email address is at http://www.qualmograph.org.uk/contact.html