mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor) (02/09/85)
I wanted to take advantage of the "Music" fonts distributed on Keith
Sproul's Fonts disks, but they did not work very well in either
MacWrite or MacPaint, so I did a little bit of diddling with the
Resource Editor and the Font Editor, to give me a reasonably nice
way of writing (but not hearing) music.
First, I created a font based on the "Music" font, but different in that
each size contains the treble and bass clef signs, and sufficient marks
to type out a line of blank music paper with a key signature (flats and
sharps for each line or space that might need them). If I were to do
it again, I would make a "character" for each number of sharps or flats
from 1 to 6, instead. This font is installed as "Music" in the System
resources.
Second, put Ravenna 9 pt in the System resources, and eliminate all other
fonts except what are required by the system (Chicago 12 is very nice
for time signatures).
The key move was to edit the "font" that holds the MacPaint icons and
paintbrushes. The Resource Editor calls it "12". I changed most of
the paintbrush shapes (characters starting at "X", if I remember correctly)
to things useful for music -- notes of all values from whole to 16th,
and corresponding rests, a "Ped" mark (for piano -- you might want something
else for your instrument), a "tr" mark, and flat, sharp, and natural signs,
plus rests for all time values, and a "dot" 2 pixels square.
With MacPaint modified this way, you can write quite good-looking scores.
Slurs can be made with the top half of ellipses having a line-width of 2
(draw the ellipse, erase the bottom half, and move it where you want with
the lasso). The Ravenna 9pt font is for things like "espressivo" between
the staves (I made a paintbrush with a script f and p for loudness marks;
the Ravenna isn't good for them).
I find it easy to edit music made this way. Make the paintbrush pattern
white, and just click away the notes you don't want. Probably you will
need to reconnect broken stave lines, but that's easy with a constrained
line in MacPaint. The only thing that is really wrong is the jaggies
on sloping tie-bars, caused by the raster, and that doesn't seem to matter
too much.
To those who want me to post the modifications to MacPaint: I'm not sure
how to do that, because the font editor doesn't know about font "12"
in MacPaint. I suppose I could tie the resource to some other file,
but I haven't time to try tricks. In any case, my version is not as
nice as it would be if I were to re-do it. If you have the Resource
Editor, it should take 2-3 hours to get the modification done.
Maybe I will put in those hours some day, and then find out how to
send it in a useful form.
Martin Taylor (...utzoo or utcsrgv[soon to be utcsri]!dciem!mmt)
--
Martin Taylor
{allegra,linus,ihnp4,floyd,ubc-vision}!utzoo!dciem!mmt
{uw-beaver,qucis,watmath}!utcsrgv!dciem!mmt