Use the Alt + X shortcut in Word for Windows, for example type 266b then Alt + X to type ♫ Beamed Eighth Note
MUSIC SYMBOL FONTS FOR WORD CODE
These are the important code numbers or values you’ll need to enter the three symbols. so the choice is pretty much made for you.There are specialist musical notation fonts such as Bravura ( OpenType download) which has sans-serif versions of the notes. Your aims are pretty comprehensive, especially with the level of zoom you want to provide etc. But actually it was pretty trivial, and the flexibility is certainly worth having. I remember the first time I integrated it into an SDL app it felt quite convoluted getting all the various libraries together. It is a very good library and you’ll be surprised how fast it is. Luckily as you probably know true type supports that. I think you realize that already.įor screen fonts with glyphs I sometimes have two or three font atlases in different sizes.īut for your application I would suggest that vector fonts would be best.
Well you could use glyphs, but you’d need to make them of a big enough size that your largest level of zoom would not look pixelated. – is there an easy way to render my SVG notation glyphs in OpenGL as vectors? I’d like to see what it looks like before I deal with a font loading library.
Given that, wouldn’t it be more wise go with vectors? I imagine that 300 or so glyphs in bitmap format at 1024x768px (size when fully zoomed in) would be quite large.īefore I dive into this font loading, etc. To be clear, when you are suggesting the use of a font, you mean an outline-based / vector font right? I don’t think bitmap textures for the notation is going to work, because finale and sibelius for example support zooming in (up to 1600%), as well as printing the score on paper. I did some research, and the big music notation tools (finale, sibelius, etc.) use true type fonts.
I would love if someone proves me wrong, but I can’t find much of anything online. Therefore, at least in the music notation domain specifically, no one has really done this in OpenGL. In these papers, the only details this author supplies are: 1) they use “OpenGL Vector Graphics” and b) “picking” for interacting with the user ( ). The source is not available, but they have a few academic papers where they allude to OpenGL. There is 1 project that I found which uses OpenGL to render music notation – it’s a university project called PWGL.
MUSIC SYMBOL FONTS FOR WORD SOFTWARE
The free notation software that I found either used a) some sort of a post script library (eg Lilypond) to basically generate a post script file and display it to the user (no interactivity), or b) used a platform-specific graphics toolkit (all of the ABC notation editors, for example) to draw very primitive notation glyphs (a few use gtk). There are very few (none?) mature music notation programs. I had looked before, but I wanted to look again after reading your reply. I scoured sourceforge, as well as google, for some musical notation software that uses opengl. What is the best method of drawing glyphs and fonts for my particular application?Īs a final note, I am looking for a combination of speed and a crisp, high resolution because I will be updating the screen during a live performance, and musical notation has many tiny graphic nuances that are significant to the performer.Īny answers or advice you have are greatly appreciated. However, I read online that doing too many polygons could be really slow. Is a font a bad thing to use in an OpenGL program? As an alternative to a bitmap type font, I was considering drawing a complex glyph (like a trebel clef) with polygons. There are many different glyphs used in music notation (a few hundred). What is the preferred way to do this sort of 2d drawing? I researched truetype fonts and OpenGL online, but it sounds like that might be impossible or very slow. as well as other italic markings in the score (eg the word “sim.” on the 6th line from the top). Additionally, I need to use a custom serif font to add in the composer’s name at the top, etc. The glyphs could be the notes themselves (ovals at a slight tilt), or the clefs, or the sharps and flats, or the time signature (4/4). I now need to add glyphs of various sizes and shapes to draw the actual notation. It probably doesn’t sound like a lot, but I am an opengl beginner, and it took me a few hours to get set up. Here’s an example of music notation to refresh your memory (courtesy of google images):Ĭurrently, I have successfully drawn the horizontal lines (staves) using OpenGL and gotten them to antialias. I am trying to make an OpenGL program that can display music notation.