I hope I'm in the correct forum. Please move this if not. Thanks.

I recently noticed musical note fonts. So cute! While looking for them, I looked in my own font book under dingbats. Found some hearts, etc. How do I incorporate them and use them in my emails, etc?

I have Mail 2.1.3 I clicked on Edit and then special characters. It brought up the fonts, but I don't know how to incorporate them into my keyboard.

Thanks.

Sounds like you want to use Character Palette. Read Mac OS 10.4, Typing special characters and symbols.

> It brought up the fonts, but I don't know how to incorporate them into my keyboard.

I don't think you can incorporate them into your keyboard, although I can't rule out the possibility that there's a 3rd party app that turns the trick; you enter them from Character Palette as you need them. (Saving the ones you like to "Favorites" makes life easier.)

Thanks, guys!!! It took a little doing, but I figured out the character palette. I will keep some in my favorites. Keyboard would be easier but this is lots better than nothing. Thanks so much.

Rita

> Thanks so much.

Happy to be able to help.

Be aware that, depending on the recipients' e-mail client/program, some of these special font symbols may not appear properly in the e-mails received by the people to whom you send them.

Thank you.

Thanks for the heads up. I would never have thought of that. I will do some test emails with my friends. Also, to myself.

Ira:

Boo-hoo. You were right. My sister has Gmail, and some of the dingbats looked like little squares (I send musical notes) and some showed nothing. Does it totally have to do with the email client or could it be because I have a Mac and she has a PC? I sent some from Mail and some from Yahoo Mail. Same result. Darn it!!

Rita

Print your email as a PDF, then send the PDF as an email attachment. The musical note font (which your sister will not have on her computer) will be embedded in the PDF and should display properly.

web browser mail (webmail) pretty much never supports unicode correctly

Unfortunately the problem can be either or both: the e-mail client or the Mac/PC issue (and what the settings are on the PC).

For example, my e-mail client (PowerMail) is set to receive in plain text only. It gives me the options to view as "fancy" either in the message or in a web browser, and I can do either one on a mail by mail basis. There are some "special" symbols I will see in the e-mail, but the fancier stuff does appear as squares or some other weird symbol when set to plain text. This could probably segue into a discussion of plain text vs. HTML for e-mails, but let's not go there.

The suggestion to send your text as a PDF attachment will certainly preserve your symbols and format but require the recipient to separately open the attachment. Then there are the people who won't accept any e-mails with attachments!

I'm gonna try that. Thanks!!

Hi Ira:

You just about covered it all and in a way I can understand. Thank you. I would think that my sis gets the fancy kind of email because she gets a lot of pics and sends them to me.

If the attachment comes from me (homemade pdf), I'm pretty sure she will open it. I do have relatives who are completely paranoid about attachments no matter who sends them, and I get that. Thanks again.

The fact that your sister gets pictures does not necessarily mean her e-mails settings will allow her to see your fancy fonts. Pictures comes as attachments as a rule, which is independent of the capability to see special fonts in an e-mail.

Some e-mail applications, like Apple's Mail, can give you the ability to see pictures in the body of your e-mail and not as attachments, but again, that can be separate from seeing fancy fonts.

Thanks and good luck!

Oh, got it. Thanks. BTW, I sent it in PDF format as an attachment, and she still didn't see my music notes. Grrrr!

Now that is strange since PDF format tends to "freeze" the document. It creates something like an editable snapshot (editable only with other software that can work with PDFs).

Try this:
1.) create your document with your music notes, etc.
2.) save it as a PDF; on a Mac usually done by pretending you are going to print the document ("Print...") and then selecting "Save as PDF" from the PDF options (where these options are depends on what version of OS X you are using, but they are in the Print dialog window. Your creation software may also be able to "Export..." or "Share..." as a PDF.
3.) open the PDF on your own Mac to see how it looks (most likely Apple's Preview or Adobe Reader will be the software that it opens with)
4.) if everything looks OK, send it to your sister, but make sure the document to her ends in ".pdf" (no quotes) before sending it as an attachment

This may be what you have already done, but it should work, and I say this because my sister sends me "weird" e-mails, most of which I never can read and I have gotten her to use this process.

I know next to nothing about the mysteries of PDF creation, but it's my understanding that fonts are not always embedded in a text-based PDF. Perhaps OS X's Print to PDF function doesn't embed them?

Hi Ira:

Yes, that's exactly what I did, and it didn't work. Maybe DK is right, it may not be imbedded? Rita

Seems to me the simple solution is to embed a graphic into the email. Use command-shift-4 to take a partial screenshot... perhaps use Preview to further crop and convert to jpeg format [which reduces the size compared to png format]... and then just drag-n-drop that file into the email message.

No "fonts" needed on the receiving end (merely the ability to view graphics inside an email... which i believe you said her computer has).

Thank you for that. I am sure you may be right. It's just a little more work than I wanted to put into it. Just wanted to add a little smilie face or musical note without going through a bunch of steps. It's not that important. Thanks for the info, though.

Rita

I didn't know that. Thanks.

Your understanding is right on the money.

Furthermore, fonts can contain "permission bits" that are set by the creator of the font, which control whether or not the font's creator wants them to be embedded in a PDF. Most PDF creation software respects these permission bits. If a font has the "do not embed" permission bit set, OS X will not embed the font into a PDF.

I've noticed that it is usually exotic fonts, such as symbol fonts (and yes, musical note fonts) which have the "do not embed" flag set by the typeface creator.

Why would a font creator do that?

Fonts are protected by copyright law. There has been quite a bit of tussling in the professional design and print community about whether or not it's OK to give copies of a font to someone else who works on a document--for example, if I buy a font as a designer, and use it to create an annual report, is it OK for me to give a copy of it to the printer so that he can print it? If the answer is "yes," does that also mean it's OK for me to give the printer a copy of QuarkXPress so he can print my job? (Font collections can cost thousands of dollars--far more than the cost of programs to do page layout.)

The advent of PDF has really muddied the issue In the past, designers, pre-press houses, print shops, service bureaus, and other companies have legally been responsible for buying copies of the fonts they use, even if many people do illegally swap fonts around without a second thought. Companies that use illegally copied fonts can and have been sued.

But with PDF files, I as a designer can buy a font, then create a press-ready PDF with embedded fonts for the service bureau or printer--and the font maker doesn't need to buy the font as well, because it's embedded within the PDF.

So the font creator potentially loses a sale. Print shops and service bureaus spend a LOT of money on fonts (at the time I was doing prepress work professionally, the company I worked for had spent approximately $17,000 on fonts alone).

Some companies, like Adobe, allow their fonts to be embedded in a PDF and don't mind taking the potential hit. The service bureaus and print shops likely buy their fonts anyway, because they don't work only with PDF files, and need to be able to accept source files as well.

But the makers of exotic fonts, particularly small font shops that don't offer ten-thousand-dollar font libraries and don't sell to hundreds of thousands of customers--feel the pinch more strongly. If you sell perhaps a hundred copies of a font a year, every lost sale hurts. You might not want to allow embedding your fonts in a PDF because you might want the print shop or service bureau to buy a copy of your font.

In my experience, the fonts that have the permission bits set to prohibit embedding are invariably exotic or special-purpose fonts sold by tiny companies that you've probably never heard of. These companies can't afford to lose even small numbers of potential sales, and typically are only barely surviving financially.

Yikes! I had no idea all that was going on behind the scenes in the font business. I just wanted to use it in my email and it has become impossible except for lots and lots of steps. Not worth it to me. The font is free in the font book on my Mac, but can't I use it because it doesn't show up except maybe in another Mac. Go figure.

Thanks for all the info. Wow!

Rita

a) Well... it's not exactly what i'd call "work".

b) You need only do it once (for each "arrangement" desired), and it's done. the image can then be added to any email via drag-n-drop... or, perhaps it could be "installed" in your sig. (i don't use Apple's Mail, so i'm not sure if it offers sigs with graphics).

You also have to look at the fonts like a whole collection of works of art. Fonts are one of the best examples of why you can't always take an image and easily zoom in OR out and still end up with something looking how you want it to.

Each letter of each size/style is hand drawn, and many fonts will do far beyond the normal 120 or so ascii characters, offering extended characters and symbols.

And because fonts zoom very badly, they typically have to draw them again for each font size. If the font shows in the popup with available sizes of 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 20, 26, 30, and 40 pt, that entire font was hand drawn nine times. The personality of a font really becomes apparent at the larger sizes. Then start more multiplying again when you apply styles. If each of those has merely a bold and italic, now you're talking twenty-seven redraws of over 100 characters. Yikes. I know if I did that much work, I'd want to get paid something for it!

The bugger is you can't always just substitute one font for another and maintain layout, especially at larger sizes. Not many fonts are mono spaced, and as a result, characters like "i" are not as wide as "w". If you don't have the correct font loaded and the system has to substitute something close, a "w" at 30pt could easily be off in width by several pixels. Over the length of a line, that will affect line wraps, and really mess up your copy.

So not only do they put a lot of work into their fonts, but they're very well aware of just how screwed up things can be for you if you don't feel like paying them for it. Even the small print houses we have here in town easily have 3-20 thousand fonts purchased. Some from the OS 8 days. (FontFinagler is very useful for converting format from old style to new so they work on the newer OSs)

That being said, many document formats can package in nonstandard fonts, but those fonts don't usually get installed into the system, they're just used for viewing the document. So if you receive a document using a font you like the looks of, you can't just create a new document and select that font, it won't be listed. So you're probably going to have to buy it anyway even if the font was bundled in.

Also worth noting that when you send a document to say, a laser printer, if you send it as text it will have the same font specification in it, and if the printer lacks the font specified, it will substitute it and the same abovementioned chaos sets in. Higher end apps like Pagemaker and Quark send copies to a printer as raw data (like a picture) to avoid this problem so WYSIWYG, but apps like Word and AppleWorks won't do that. I've ran into many cases of the printout not looking like the preview window. (both in character separations and line wraps)

Those are interesting observations and distinctions you are making. Perhaps the original poster's fonts are indeed from a smaller company and that is the source of his problems.

Too bad, but perhaps he could experiment and see if only certain of the specialized fonts are causing issues. Of course, that would be for our collective curiosity and not necessarily resolve his problems.

Hey Ira:

Original poster....are you talking about me? I'm a girl!!

Anyway, I assumed that if a font was in my font book, I could use it without problems. According to Virtual1, perhaps not. I think I got TMI but appreciate all the input. Back to plain old emails for me!!

Rita

Hmm, i just consulted Character Palette for this item: ♫

It seems to be included in several fonts:
Andale Mono
Apple Symbols
Arial
Courier New
Hiragino
Impact
STHeiti
Times New Roman

...but -- in other words -- it's not included in the other fonts.

When we try to force another font to display it, things appear to work... but actually, OSX is doing a substitution under the hood. For those particular eighth notes then, it seems to default to using "Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN" (when we try to apply some other font, such as Lucida Grande).

Interestingly, several of those fonts are something that Windows users should already have. Perhaps there's a flaw in the way the email gets transported (character encoding), or perhaps Windows isn't as thoughtful as OSX, where that font substitution business is concerned. [note that: these forums use Trebuchet MS (or Georgia or Courier) for its fonts... so the fact that we can *see* those eighth notes in Safari must mean that OSX is doing a substitution within this post right now!]

(btw, STHeiti is an attractive font i've never noticed before)

I guess maybe what i'm saying is this: if those are the "musical notes" you were sending plantsower, perhaps applying a specific font within the email... such as Arial or Times New Roman (which a Windows user is likely to have), and making sure you're sending html (not plain-text emails), then maybe (MAYBE) the receiving computer will stand a better chance of properly displaying ♫ .

Look what the music note looked like in my Yahoo email from your message: ♫ I forwarded it to my Mail account and got the same thing. Not sure if that's because it was always the "wrong symbol" in the Yahoo email or not.

I changed all my email fonts (had 4 and didn't know which to change so changed them all) to New Times Roman. I included the musical note and a heart. I enlarged both so my sister can see them. I hope I hear from her tomorrow to see if she could see the notes and hearts. I didn't use the pdf format, just wanted to see if I could send it in regular email this time with the changed fonts.

Does "Yahoo email" mean that you're composing and sending your messages in a web browser? Or do you use a normal email client program of some sort? [sorry if this has been mentioned before... just that "Yahoo email" phrase makes me wonder.] Anyway, apparently the character encoding is getting lost (and/or perhaps the font information too). Somewhere there [in a prefs area] should be a place to select various character encodings. Be sure that Unicode (UTF-8) is one, and also Western (ISO-8859-1), and maybe one saying "Windows" as well.

Actually, i'm not fully up-to-snuff on all that, maybe tacit has a better perspective. [i.e., if you show us the "header" from the email you echoed, we can probably glean the encoding info there. Send a short message with nothing other than a few odd chars... and then post the entire *source* view here.]

I would maybe try the Arial font too, before giving up: ♥

I use the "Mail" program on my Mac. I have Yahoo, too. On Mail, I looked under prefs for encoding choices and couldn't find any. Rita

> On Mail, I looked under prefs for encoding choices and couldn't find any.

Hi, Rita,

Mail>Menu bar>Message>Text Encoding is what you're looking for...to a degree, anyhow.

I have absolutely no idea how it works, but good luck with it.

Edit: Mine is set at Automatic, and it reverts from Unicode (UTF-8) to Automatic after an e-mail incorporating the Unicode option is sent, if that's of any importance.

I sent e-mails to myself (using the Unicode option) incorporating " ⌥ ⇧ ¢ ⬆ ⬇ ← ↑ ↓ → ©   ⌘ ⋀" and "𝄞 𝄡 𝄢 ♮ ♯ 𝄪 𝄫," and I received them intact.

(The "Automatic" setting seemed to yield the same results, so... . )

Hope this helps.

Right... step one is to be sure she can send/receive on her own side properly. The second challenge will be bringing her sister's PC into the fray. (admittedly i'm only guessing this will work, but it seems to me that — via html and a *common* font like Arial or TNR — it should be doable).

Mea culpa! I did not read back up the sequence of posts, which would have helped me.

Hi:

I honestly don't understand what I'm supposed to do from the paragraph below. Maybe a little bit more in layman's terms? Thanks.

Rita

I did send the notes, etc. to myself when I first started this, and they showed up just fine in my email client. Thanks for the info about where to find the encoding though I'm not sure what I am supposed to do with it. I believe mine is set on automatic, also. Rita

Yes, Ira. It's all your fault. Rita

I'll take a shot at Hal's intent...

As you can see in Character Palette, your music glyphs are all included in several font collections, so he's suggesting that you use a "common" font such as Arial in your e-mails; I'm not certain what the "via html" part refers to, but if your sister's PC has any such setting it should probably be set to accept html.

Try dashing off an e-mail with all the Arial glyphs in it, and see if anything comes out the other end of the pipe. (Try using both Mail>Menu bar>Message>Text Encoding>Automatic and Unicode (UTF-8), and let us know how you make out.

Thanks artie... i use a different email client (Postbox), and i've never even toyed with Apple's "Mail" (hmm, wonder why they didn't call it iMail ) -- so anyway, i'd have to fish around before finding those settings (and still not be sure how well they work without trying them).

> Thanks artie...

Happy to have helped, Hal, but even happier to have (apparently) correctly divined your intent.

OK. I just sent two test emails to my sis. One with auto and arial and one with UTF-8 and Arial.

Still don't know if she gets HTML. She isn't in my state so I can't run over and look and don't know how to check a PC for that anyway.

I'll get back to you.

Thanks.

> OK. I just sent two test emails to my sis.

I've got a friend who, sadly, runs a PC (Yep... Just one [friend with a PC, that is]! ), and the musical notes in the e-mail I sent him all made it through the pipe.

Trouble is, though, that the only two setting he knows on his thing are "Asleep" and "Awake," so he'll be useless as an assistant trouble-shooter.

Thanks for doing that, Artie. I was going to ask if you had a junk email I could send the notes to and then I remembered who I was talking to!!! A MAC PERSON - DUH!!! I need to find someone else to send these notes to. My husband has a PC and they came out like little squares on his, too.

Not having worked with a pc for years, I don't remember how to change to check for html on it. He uses Mail.com. Maybe I can check that and see how it's set. If he has a choice to go HTML and hasn't, I can try that when I get a chance. I'm not sure if it makes a difference whether one can accept html settings in a Gmail account (my sis)or it has to be on the whole computer? Not that savvy.

I sure didn't expect to still be talking about this. I'm willing to drop it if you are. Rita