Musical notes in subtitles?

[sky captain]

I'd like to incorporate musical notes to indicate songs that play during my piece. This is done often with closed captioning for the deaf.

Anyone know what I do to get those symbols to show? Is there a special font, like wingdings, I should go to?

I'm using the URUsoft subtitle workshop and then authoring in Adobe Encore.

[Cornucopia]

If you were to buy a music notation software, such as Finale, or even a good Midi editor with notation capability, such as Cakewalk, they come bundled with a couple of specialized music-symbol type fonts. Don't know of any freeware/shareware, but you could always Google search...

Once the fonts are installed in your system, their good to go for use in a Subtitling app. Have successfully done this very thing.

Scott

[sky captain]

Thanks, I'll take a look for some freeware fonts.

I'm thankful someone here knows what I'm talking about. The Adobe forums were less than helpful.

[SLK001]

If you're talking about simply putting symbols at the beginning of a song text, like "♪" or "♫" - like:

♪ I'll be there ♪,

then you can grab them from the Windows fonts. They don't show properly in this post, but I grabbed these from TIMES NEW ROMAN font, UNICODE character set.

If you're trying to put the actual musical notations on the subtitle stream, then you'll have to find the fonts somewhere.

Since subtitles (unlike closed captions) are simple bitmap drawings, you can also "sketch" what you want in any drawing package (but maybe a big pain in the ass!) and put them in the subtitle stream.

[sky captain]

Wow, great idea. Just like what I'd have to do to track down a copyright symbol.

I guess I was just concerned that random DVD players wouldn't read the fonts correctly. You never know.

[borax]

Subtitles on DVD are 'pixel graphics'. Therefore DVD players itself can't have a problem with any font you use.

[Jeremiah58]

Sky captain,
The musical note fonts you are looking for, already exist in Microsoft Word.
Open Word, go to Insert, Symbol, and choose Miscellaneous Dingbats (from Subset drop-down menu).
The problem is that those symbols can not be shown in Subtitle Workshop.
I do not know what format of subtitles Adobe Encore uses, but those musical fonts can be copy-pasted from Word into subtitles in Sony DVD Architect (editing text of imported subtitle).
Try this trick, if Adobe Encore allows editing of a subtitle text.

[Cornucopia]

The fonts that Jeremiah58 is referring to are part of the TimesNewRoman family. They reside in the higher reaches of the Unicode character set table--that's probably why they aren't visible to Subtitle Workshop, although if you typed the Unicode [ALT]+keycombination, I bet it would insert. Of course, you could just as easily use the WEBDINGS font and type in [ALT]+[NumPad175]. Or the MTBWIDGETS font (which has 4 characters).
Nonetheless, that only gives you 2 characters. If all you want to do is have some marker denoting "musical passage here", that's probably good enough. If you want to show a score, it won't be.
I did a quick google search myself for freeware/shareware fonts: Came up with "Musical Symbols" and "Bach", both of which will work in all text-based programs (this includes graphics programs that have a text tool). Bach even has the ability to get the staff height right.

Scott

[sky captain]

Thanks for all the help. What I ended up doing was exporting my Encore appropriate text file from Subtitle Workshop.

I then open the txt file in Notepad and paste in my notes from the character map. I save as Unicode and import into Encore.

I thought about just writing "music plays" but I like having the notes. I use them like parentheses around lines of lyrics in a song. This is a standard format with closed captioning.

Now I'm having a whole new problem with subtitle sync. Help me if you dare in this other thread...