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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