Mark,
Thank you for the complete explanation. Between my posting and your
reply, I found this webpage that explained pretty much the same thing
you did.
http://kitblog.com/2008/10/romanian_diacritic_marks.html
The example on the above page (wrong!) given was taken from Romanian
CURRENCY fer cryin' out loud, and the caron I was looking for was
taken from the Boosey and Hawkes edition I was working from (also
wrong!) so maybe I can be partially excused. I was unaware of the
difference between the comma and the cedilla until I read it on that
web page, and then of course from you.
I will check out the IPA fonts you linked to. That looks like exactly
the thing I need. I will get on MakeMusic's case (again!) about
Unicode support. I feel like I should use the proper diacriticals out
of respect, and so as not to look like an illiterate fool. 50-50, you
understand. 8-)
Thanks also to Noel and Dennis. I was going to try to avoid a
separate expression with the accent, as I am trying to have movement
titles centre automatically on the page on linked parts, which turns
out to be a bit of a kludge already. I also have very bad luck with
getting graphic expressions to position correctly. Every time I turn
around they have moved themselves again. I can't believe I am the
only one with this problem. How do you other guys deal with the
graphics moving all the time?
Christopher
On Thu Sep 9, at ThursdaySep 9 8:42 PM, Mark D Lew wrote:
On Sep 9, 2010, at 6:18 AM, Christopher Smith wrote:
I am putting titles into a piece in Romanian (Bartok's Romanian
Folk Dances), and I am having trouble finding some of the proper
characters, which mostly seem to be Unicode.
If you'll forgive a bit of pedantry from one who is both a
typophile and an phonetician, two corrections...
but I need a capital A with the caret inverted (Character Palette
calls it a "caron"), and a T with a cedilla ("comma below" in
Character Palette) in another title.
1. If it's Romanian, the symbol you want is surely a breve and not
a caron. A caron is angled like an inverted caret; a breve is
rounded like a semicircle. Romanian includes use of a breve or a
circumflex over an "A", but never a caron. (In general, carons are
used only with consonants in European languages. The only use of
carons over vowels that I'm familiar with is to represent the
falling-rising pattern in tone languages.)
2. There is a difference between a cedilla and a comma below. The
cedilla touches the letter, and the comma below does not. For
Romanian, comma below (on "s" or "t") is correct. A cedilla is
incorrect in Romanian. Use of it is generally accepted anyway, by
necessity, because it's much more widely available than the proper
comma below, but purists will tell you that it's still wrong.
The S and T cedilla characters were included in the earliest
versions of Unicode, whereas the comma below characters didn't get
put in until Unicode 3.0 (at the explicit urging of the Romanian
delegation). The S cedilla is standard in Turkish. I'm not aware
of any language that uses the T cedilla, which makes its inclusion
in Unicode 1.1 all the more bizarre. (I've heard it said that the T
cedilla was simply a mistake by the Unicode folks, who thought they
were doing it for Romanian and just got it wrong, and I wonder if
that's really true.)
Here are the characters, which I can easily insert into my Mail
program which supports Unicode!
ȚǍ
The T here is correct for Romanian. The A here is incorrect for
Romanian.
--
As for your main question, since Finale doesn't support Unicode,
the only way you're going to type these characters is if you find a
font that maps them to the lower ASCII range. Fifteen years ago,
that was not so hard to do. There has always been a demand for
those characters, so in the days before Unicode was widespread lots
of people created fonts in order to be able to type the way they
want to type. But anyone who designs such a font now is going to
use Unicode, because it's the standard after all.
I'm afraid I need to shout once again what an outrage it is that
Finale STILL doesn't support Unicode. It's not just that this is
an extremely common and extremely useful standard that we ought to
have access to, but it's now reached the point where, precisely
because THE ENTIRE FREAKIN' UNIVERSE USES UNICODE NOW, no one
anymore will design fonts that *aren't* Unicode, so it's now even
more impossible to get non-standard characters into Finale than it
was in 1995. This is so ridiculous. I don't care what code they
have to rewrite in Finale, they NEED to have Unicode. Is there any
other major software anywhere that doesn't?
I remember from some time in the mid 1990s printing IPA text in
Finale files using SIL's IPA fonts, and it worked well for me. Like
everyone else, SIL moved on to Unicode long ago, but I see they
still offer the old fonts as unsupported "legacy" versions, at
<http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?
&item_id=LegacyTTFKmn&highlight=legacy>. Possibly you could find
something there that works for you.
As a more practical matter, if you only need a few of them in
titling, your best bet is probably to enter them as separate text
blocks. That is, type the normal title without diacritics. Then
make a separate text block with just a comma, size it to whatever
looks right and drag into position. Then find a symbol in one of
the music fonts that can pass as a breve and do the same with that.
mdl
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