On 10 Mar 2003 at 5:13, Noel Stoutenburg wrote: > In response to Patsy Moore, who wrote, in part > > > >Can anyone give me ALT + numbers versions of the distinctive Czech > > >letters? > > Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote, in part: > > > You can then use the > > Character Map to copy and paste, or if you just want Czech, here they are: > > Personally, I find the Character Map utility in Windows to be difficult to use, > due to its small size, . . .
In Windows 2000 and later, this problem has been addressed. It isn't sizable, but it now default to a size appropriate for your screen resolution, instead of remaining exactly the same size on 640x480 and 1280x1024. It also has some excellent "filtering" functionality, such as searching for a character name. If you search for "tilde" you get the display filtered to the characters with a tilde in them. Of course, one problem is that the people at Microsoft (or whoever it is who determines the wordy names of the characters) are not very smart and think the characters ü, ä and ö have a diaeresis instead of an umlaut. It also handles Unicode and all that is entailed with that (i.e., Times New Roman has not just Roman and Greek, but Hebrew and Arabic, while also having alternate font sets for other languagues, such as Cyrillic and, with the appropriate Windows language installed, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.). And another UI improvement is "Unicode subgroups," which, when chosen, opens a popup with choices like: General Punctuation Currency Number Forms (includes fractions) Arrows Mathematical operators And so forth. This is all extremely useful, and much easier to navigate than the Finale dialog, which is the same as the one used when choosing a character for an expression or articulation -- I've always found it user-unfriendly, because it's not in any logical order and the size is small enough that it's hard to find anything at all. An intelligent dialog for a music program would be organized by musical symbol functionality for music fonts and in some other intelligent manner for text fonts. Something like the subgroups above would be fabulous, such as clefs, dynamics, noteheads, flags, etc. > . . . and was pleasantly surprised to find that it is not > necessary to use this. > From the text dialog box (though not the text espression dialog box), if one > selects the menu "text", the bottom item has been, at least since FIN2k, > "insert symbol". Selecting this menu item provides a much easier to read > character map than the Windows utility. But that dialog is not very sensibly organized, unlike the Windows character map, and gives you no features that any version of charmap has had, except that it displays at a legible size. With recent versions of Windows, that is no longer an issue (I would guess that Windows ME has the improved charmap, since it borrowed a lot from Win2K; but I'd never recommend that anyone use ME; I have a hard time recommending XP, too, but it's basically your only choice these days). -- David W. Fenton | http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates | http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
