Character fonts

Note: Some features in this chapter are only available in Harmony Assistant.

What is a character font?

A character font defines the appearance text will have on screen. A font is stored in a file that includes all the characters to be drawn. This file is usually located in the system folder of your computer. Thus, any software can use these fonts for drawing text. Here are some names of common fonts: Times, Courier, Arial...

The specific font for Harmony and Melody Assistant

To draw most of the basic musical symbols (note heads, rests, effects), Harmony and Melody use a specific font, installed along with the software: it is the Stoccata font.
Under Windows, Stoccata font is stored in the "Stoccata.ttf" file. Under Macintosh, it is in the "Myriad Music Font" file.

Using fonts for displaying text

Text that is displayed on the score, as well as in the page header, page footer, lyrics line, chord line, etc. can use any font installed on your computer. When viewing the document on a computer that does not own one of the used fonts, an alert message is displayed, and the font is substituted with the default font (Geneva on Macintosh and Arial on Windows).

To change the text font or its attributes (size, display mode), click the lower-case light blue "A" icon. The font setting window, including an example of text in the selected font, appears. A pop-up menu lets you change the font.
Under Windows, a right-click on this menu opens the regular font selector window.

Using another font besides Stoccata

Many other musical fonts other than Stoccata exist. For example, "Jazz", "Inkpen", "Maestro"... You can use these fonts to display musical symbols with Harmony Assistant.

Note: Before using a font, you need to agree with the usage license provided by the designer of that font. We invite you to read this agreement before any use.

Each staff in your document can use a different character set. The same character set can blend several fonts.

To change the character set related to a staff, edit the staff display options ("Staff" menu) and select a character set in the pop-up menu. To apply this set to the whole score, check the "Apply to all staves" box.

If the character set you are selecting uses a font that is not installed on your computer, an alert message is displayed. Correct display of the staff will then only be possible on a computer that owns this font.

Defining a custom musical character set

By default, character sets are provided for the most common fonts.
You can define your own character set and save it, in order to use it later in any of your documents. Click the "Edit" button in the staff display options box.
If you only need to apply changes to an existing character set, select it in the pop-up menu before clicking "Edit".
If the selected set is a built-in default set, you will be asked to rename your changed copy: you cannot change a default set.

In the left part of the window are displayed all the musical characters in the Stoccata font that you can replace.
For each of these characters, you can select: the font to be used, the character in this font, the graphical offset and the scale.

First select the font in the pop-up menu. The array on the right then shows all the available characters in this font. Select the required character from this array.
You must now adjust the size and position of this character to make it as close as possible to the original one (in the Stoccata font).
The central area, on a yellow background, shows the character in SToccata font, along with the selected character, in order to help you adjust it. You can click in this area to move the character.

If, in the character set you are editing, you do not want the original (SToccata) character to be replaced with another, click "Standard".

Perform this operation for as many of the characters as you wish.

Once done, click "OK". The character set is automatically saved in the "Charset" subfolder, with the ".set" extension, it is now available for any of your documents.

Note: Correct display and printing of a score that uses another font than SToccata requires that font to be installed on the computer. Correct display and printing of a score that uses another character set than the default one requires that character set to be included in the "Charset" folder.