Music character sets

For more details about how to use text or music character fonts in Harmony Assistant, please read the "Character fonts" chapter.

What is a character set?

A character set enables to define the graphical look of music symbols that appear on a score.

You can select the character set when creating a new document in Harmony Assisyant, through the pop-up menu that appears in the bottom right corner of the template selection box. The default character set uses the Stoccata font, which is located in the "Stoccata.ttf" file in the application "Fonts" subfolder.

You can also select afterward a different character set for each staff of your score, through the popu-up menu in the "Staff > Staff display mode" menu option.

To change the character set for the whole score once it has been created, you can use "Score > Display setup"

At the beginning of the list appear the character sets that use fonts shipped with Harmony Assistant. When you are using them, you can be sure that any other user of Harmony Assistant, Melody Player or Myriad plug-in owns them too. The appearance of your score will therefore be the same on any computer.

At the bottom of the list, names written in italic are chararcter sets that can be used in Harmony Assistant, but the matching fonts are not included in the program, for copyright reasons.
Some of them can be purchased from their author, or they are delivered with other music software. If a font is installed in your system, the menu option appears in black, and you can use it. If not installed, it appears in gray.

Be careful, if you use one of these sets, the appearance of your score on another computer will be identical only if the matching font is installed on that computer.

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.

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 "Fonts" folder.