Looking for copy-paste musical notes

October 14, 2012 12:57 PM

I want to copy-paste musical notes into Word.

I found this, which gives me these seven musical symbols to copy paste: ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♭ ♮ ♯. But I want a whole note and a half note as well.

I don't want to learn any new program -- if I can't copy paste I'll just draw in the notes.

posted by ClaudiaCenter to computers & internet (12 answers total)

Unicode musical symbols
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 1:00 PM on October 14, 2012

I'm sorry, I don't know what that means -- I am not as computer saavy as that.
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 1:01 PM on October 14, 2012

Do you have the Petrucci font installed? If so, the letters H and W are half and whole notes (capital and lowercase H flip stem direction).

If not, you can download Petrucci here.
posted by dr. boludo at 1:02 PM on October 14, 2012

Petrucci looks good but I don't know how to do this: "To install these fonts, save or move them into the windows/fonts/ directory OR Go to the control panel and install the fonts from any directory using the Install New Font choice under FILE." I downloaded the font and then went to the control panel but could not find the "Install New Font" choice. I will try to have a friend help me later.
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 1:09 PM on October 14, 2012

On that link above: Use Ctrl-f in your web browser to search for the symbol you want (whole note, half note, etc), and then copy and paste the symbol in the third column.

I.e.,

whole note 𝅝
half note 𝅗𝅥
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 1:12 PM on October 14, 2012

Qxnt -- followed those instructions and got two squares in my Word document. Apologies for illustrating the great divide between tech and non-tech people. In happier news, I solved the problem in a low-tech way by using a circle symbol for a whole note, and by using a circle symbol plus a line symbol to replicate a half note.
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 1:18 PM on October 14, 2012

They show up as squares in my browser, too. Both on the Wikipedia page and in this thread.
posted by cribcage at 1:36 PM on October 14, 2012

If you use the font, only people who have the font installed will be able to see the characters.

Instead, use a unicode character - which means any base system font that includes all of them (like the Arial, Helvetica, Lucida etc. that came preinstalled on your Mac or PC) will work.

http://panmental.de/symbols/info.htm

I don't know enough about music to know if those characters are present, but that includes all of them.
posted by luriete at 1:51 PM on October 14, 2012

>Instead, use a unicode character - which means any base system font that includes all of them (like the Arial, Helvetica, Lucida etc. that came preinstalled on your Mac or PC) will work.

Unfortunately Unicode is a large set of characters, and some character ranges (like the musical-notation range U+1D100 – U+1D1FF) are not pre-installed on most PC's.

If you are seeing boxes instead of musical symbols in qxntpqbbbqxl's link then you need to install the Code2001 font. Download Code2001.TTF from here (http://font.su/fonts/#Code2001). Once downloaded double-click and select install.
posted by zinon at 2:20 PM on October 14, 2012 [1 favorite]

Weird. Mac OS includes the entire unicode set on many of those system fonts, I didn't think that some would be missing it.
posted by luriete at 5:14 PM on October 14, 2012

Here's a quick and dirty way.

Go to images.google.com, and search for "whole note". Find a nice one, right click it, select Copy Image (that option should exist), and paste it into your word document with a ctrl-v. Then select it, and scale it to the size you want, which I assume is small.

Do make sure the image is free to use, if you care about that kind of thing.
posted by hanoixan at 5:41 PM on October 14, 2012

Thanks, everyone -- I will download the Code 2001 and/or the Petrucci fonts when I have time to figure it out.
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 6:50 PM on October 14, 2012