Making Word recognise a font as a symbol font

[lloydHoughton]

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.
Perhaps even more importantly: if Word recognises a font as a symbol font, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to the glyph as it appears in
that particular font, which you can't do for characters from regular
fonts.
Short version: 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]

No, we can't. I have asked Microsoft for you, but have yet to get an
answer.

Sorry

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.
Perhaps even more importantly: if Word recognises a font as a symbol font, you
can assign a keyboard shortcut to the glyph as it appears in
that particular font, which you can't do for characters from regular
fonts.
Short version: 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]

 

[lloydHoughton]

John - thanks for checking on this for me. I'll check back here and in the usenet group. I hope they can tell you how Word populates that Symbol list! Word for PC lets you treat all fonts as symbol fonts, and I wonder why they would take that option away in the Mac version...

One thought--I know very little about this, but is it possible that the OS itself, not Word, manages categories of fonts, and it's to the OS that I have to explain the font is to be used as a symbol font?

Cheers -- Lloyd.

 

[lloydHoughton]

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 just long enough for me to create keyboard shortcuts for the few characters I need often. I can use this in combination with searching-and-replacing the old font with the new font instead of changing font for the whole selection, to avoid junking the symbols if I need to change fonts in the document.

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Lloyd:

Yeah, they CAN tell me. The question is whether they WILL tell me.

As far as I know, the OS does not have a concept of "Symbol" fonts. It's
left to the application to determine what it thinks is a Symbol font.

I KNOW it's in a preference somewhere, I just don't know which one...

Glad you enjoyed the article: that was written to rescue the Word X people
who discovered to their horror that Microsoft's implementation of "Unicode"
was not actually all that complete

Cheers

John - thanks for checking on this for me. I'll check back here and in the
usenet group. I hope they can tell you how Word populates that Symbol list!
Word for PC lets you treat all fonts as symbol fonts, and I wonder why they
would take that option away in the Mac version...

One thought--I know very little about this, but is it possible that the OS
itself, not Word, manages categories of fonts, and it's to the OS that I have
to explain the font is to be used as a symbol font?

Cheers -- 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]

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Did you test the Character Palette approach? Because in my quick tests,
symbols inserted that way did not change when I changed fonts in Word.

 

[lloydHoughton]

Daiya - the character palette doesn't work for me, with this font. It inserts a blank square when I try to insert one the symbols I want, and the status bar of the character palette tells me "Couldn't set the application font. Please set it to "Bach" in the application."

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Bummer. Good information to have in the archives, though.