making a font a symbol font

[lloyd]

I'm running Word2004 on 10.4.11.

I want a music font that I have installed to be recognised among the
symbol fonts instead of as a regular font. When I "insert symbol" Word
gives me a choice of a subset of all my fonts--just the ones that it
somehow knows are symbol fonts. If the font I need isn't there, then
instead of inserting a symbol I have to change fonts to the font I
need, and either type the character from the keyboard or insert it as
regular text. The problem is, if later I decide I need to change the
font of a document, Word changes the font of everything selected,
including the symbols interspersed in the text--the symbols become
junk characters in the new font. Whereas, if a character is from a
symbol font, its font is preserved even if it's part of the selection
you apply a font change to, because Word understands it's a symbol.
Another important thing is that for fonts that Word recognises as
symbol fonts, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to that character in
that particular font, which you can't do for characters from regular
fonts.

Can anyone figure out how I can get my music font--it's called "Bach"--
to appear in the list of fonts that appear when I "insert symbol"?
Thank you!

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Lloyd:

Sadly, there is no easy way to do this.

You need to find and edit the following .plist:

/Users/~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Font Substitutes.plist

If you don't know how, make sure you make a copy first, in case of accidents


Hope this helps

I'm running Word2004 on 10.4.11.

I want a music font that I have installed to be recognised among the
symbol fonts instead of as a regular font. When I "insert symbol" Word
gives me a choice of a subset of all my fonts--just the ones that it
somehow knows are symbol fonts. If the font I need isn't there, then
instead of inserting a symbol I have to change fonts to the font I
need, and either type the character from the keyboard or insert it as
regular text. The problem is, if later I decide I need to change the
font of a document, Word changes the font of everything selected,
including the symbols interspersed in the text--the symbols become
junk characters in the new font. Whereas, if a character is from a
symbol font, its font is preserved even if it's part of the selection
you apply a font change to, because Word understands it's a symbol.
Another important thing is that for fonts that Word recognises as
symbol fonts, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to that character in
that particular font, which you can't do for characters from regular
fonts.

Can anyone figure out how I can get my music font--it's called "Bach"--
to appear in the list of fonts that appear when I "insert symbol"?
Thank you!

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[CyberTaz]

Hello Lloyd -

Another thought or two that may be simpler when the need to change font
arises in docs where the music notation has been used...

Rather than Command+A - change font, use Find & Replace to change only "xyz"
font to "abc" font using the Format option of Find & Replace, or

Create a character style for the music characters that specifies the music
font to control the reformatting.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Different approaches, if you don't feel like editing a prefs list.

1) for really frequently used symbols, set up a formatted AutoCorrect
via Tools | AutoCorrect (might not bypass the font change problem)

2) see if using the OS X Character Palette gives you different results
and easier access to your music font. Look up character palette in Mac
Help--it lists things in categories and lets you set favorites. In a
quick test, stuff inserted through the Character Palette persists when
the font is changed--but I was testing math symbols, not sure if music
fonts will automatically show up as a category in the CP (but it might
be easier to make them show up there than deal with Word's prefs)

 

[lloyd]

I asked:

You need to find and edit the following .plist:

/Users/~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Font Substitutes.plist

John - thanks. This doesn't seem too hard, but it didn't work for me.
I opened the substitute list in textedit and added the line "Bach=" to
this section at the end of the list:

; CUSTOM SETTINGS FOLLOW
; The following fonts should use Roman to display
[SymbolFonts]
Symbol=
Zapf Dingbats=
Wingdings=
Wingdings 2=
Wingdings 3=
Monotype Sorts=
Lucida Bright Math Extension=
Lucida Bright Math Italic=
Lucida Bright Math Symbol=
LucidMatSym=
LucidMatIta=
LucidMatExt=
Minion Ornaments=
Hoefler Text Ornaments=
MS Linedraw=
MT Extra=
Webdings=
Bach=

I restarted the computer and ran Word, but the Bach font still doesn't
appear in the symbol list. And strangely enough, neither do most of
the others listed here. Instead, I have a whole slew of Asian
alphabets, and the following:

AppleGothis
AppleMyungjo
GB18030 Bitmap
Hei
Hoefler Text Ornaments
Kai
Monotype Sorts
MT Extra
Osaka
Symbol
Webdings
Webdings 2
Webdings 3
Zapf Dingbats

So there is some overlap but not very much. Any ideas where I am going
wrong? Thanks so much for your help. And thanks for the other
suggested workarounds from people - I'm still trying to get Word to
recognise the Bach font for now, as this will make it easiest for me
to define keyboard shortcuts in Word for the specific glyphs I want.
When I used to work on a PC the "insert symbol" option let you choose
*any* font, which was then treated as a fixed glyph and not undone by
overall font changes. If I can't get it done I'll try the character
palette suggestion. Best -- Lloyd.

 

[Jeff Wiseman]

I'm running Word2004 on 10.4.11.

I want a music font that I have installed to be recognised among the
symbol fonts instead of as a regular font. When I "insert symbol" Word
gives me a choice of a subset of all my fonts--just the ones that it
somehow knows are symbol fonts. If the font I need isn't there, then
instead of inserting a symbol I have to change fonts to the font I
need, and either type the character from the keyboard or insert it as
regular text. The problem is, if later I decide I need to change the
font of a document, Word changes the font of everything selected,
including the symbols interspersed in the text--the symbols become
junk characters in the new font. Whereas, if a character is from a
symbol font, its font is preserved even if it's part of the selection
you apply a font change to, because Word understands it's a symbol.
Another important thing is that for fonts that Word recognises as
symbol fonts, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to that character in
that particular font, which you can't do for characters from regular
fonts.

It sounds like you are not dealing with a really large set of
characters. This is a total guess on my part as I've never tried
this, but I would be interested to know how big a deal it would
be to create a toolbar with all those characters in it so when
you hit the toolbar button, you get that character inserted.

I mean, if you can get it into a toolbar, you can also assign
keyboard shortcuts to it as well, right?

Just curious

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Jeff -

It sounds like you are not dealing with a really large set of
characters. This is a total guess on my part as I've never tried
this, but I would be interested to know how big a deal it would
be to create a toolbar with all those characters in it so when
you hit the toolbar button, you get that character inserted.

I mean, if you can get it into a toolbar, you can also assign
keyboard shortcuts to it as well, right?

Just curious

I'm afraid that won't work - You can assign *fonts* to a toolbar button, but
not individual characters within a font. The closest you could come would be
by creating a separate macro to insert each character & assigning each macro
to a separate button &/or keystroke... But that's roughly the equivalent of
reinventing the wheel

That still wouldn't help the OP's main issue. There's no trouble getting the
characters inserted, it's keeping them formatted in the correct font when
reformatting the surrounding text that's causing the problem.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Lloyd:

Oh, damn!

Then I am afraid I have no answer for you.

I will try to obtain one, but it may take a while.

Sorry...

I asked:

You need to find and edit the following .plist:

/Users/~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Font Substitutes.plist

John - thanks. This doesn't seem too hard, but it didn't work for me.
I opened the substitute list in textedit and added the line "Bach=" to
this section at the end of the list:

; CUSTOM SETTINGS FOLLOW
; The following fonts should use Roman to display
[SymbolFonts]
Symbol=
Zapf Dingbats=
Wingdings=
Wingdings 2=
Wingdings 3=
Monotype Sorts=
Lucida Bright Math Extension=
Lucida Bright Math Italic=
Lucida Bright Math Symbol=
LucidMatSym=
LucidMatIta=
LucidMatExt=
Minion Ornaments=
Hoefler Text Ornaments=
MS Linedraw=
MT Extra=
Webdings=
Bach=

I restarted the computer and ran Word, but the Bach font still doesn't
appear in the symbol list. And strangely enough, neither do most of
the others listed here. Instead, I have a whole slew of Asian
alphabets, and the following:

AppleGothis
AppleMyungjo
GB18030 Bitmap
Hei
Hoefler Text Ornaments
Kai
Monotype Sorts
MT Extra
Osaka
Symbol
Webdings
Webdings 2
Webdings 3
Zapf Dingbats

So there is some overlap but not very much. Any ideas where I am going
wrong? Thanks so much for your help. And thanks for the other
suggested workarounds from people - I'm still trying to get Word to
recognise the Bach font for now, as this will make it easiest for me
to define keyboard shortcuts in Word for the specific glyphs I want.
When I used to work on a PC the "insert symbol" option let you choose
*any* font, which was then treated as a fixed glyph and not undone by
overall font changes. If I can't get it done I'll try the character
palette suggestion. Best -- Lloyd.

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]

 

[Jeff Wiseman]

On 1/29/08 8:35 PM, in article (e-mail address removed), "Jeff
Wiseman" <[email protected]> wrote:

I'm afraid that won't work - You can assign *fonts* to a toolbar button, but
not individual characters within a font. The closest you could come would be
by creating a separate macro to insert each character & assigning each macro
to a separate button &/or keystroke... But that's roughly the equivalent of
reinventing the wheel

That still wouldn't help the OP's main issue. There's no trouble getting the
characters inserted, it's keeping them formatted in the correct font when
reformatting the surrounding text that's causing the problem.

Thanks for that info, I had been wondering about that before.

I also wonder if there is some way the special font could be
protected by using a Character Style (perhaps placed in a toolbar
for convenience)? The Character style could be assigned the
special font so that there would be some protection when
reformatting of the surrounding stuff, but it wouldn't help
getting it into the menus the way that the OP was looking for.

 

[lloyd]

I've found a partial solution. Now I can use keyboard shortcuts that
will insert the right glyph from the Bach font while I'm typing in
another font; they're not protected if I change fonts though. It was
in this document:

http://word.mvps.org/Mac/Unicode.html

Scroll down to the section called "Making Word show you the whole
font". That trick doesn't let me keep my font in the "symbol" list,
but it puts it there long enough for me to create keyboard shortcuts
for the few characters I need often. I can use this in combination
with the suggestion by CyberTaz that instead of changing font, I
search-and-replace font formatting. Together this solves my problem.