[Cottontail]

I'm writing a paper on Schenkerian analysis and I need to be able to type carets over numbers. I have already tried hitting Opt-I and then typing the number, but I get "^3" instead, which is not what I want. I'm currently using Pages, but I could load up Office if need be. Is there a way to do what I want or do I have to accept "^3"?

[richwig83]

I dont know but if i remember correctly ^3 etc will be acceptable.

[ghporter]

Mac's "intelligent" multilingual characters are a bit too smart for their own good. If you press "Ctl-i", you get a smart carat, under which you can place something like an 'e' or 'i' by just typing it (ê, î). But it doesn't work for numbers because those aren't "valid" characters...

[thechidz]

haha! a fellow music student. I have always struggled with this in my papers and now that I am in my 5th year of grad school I have concluded that it's probably best to just state "scale degree" before the number. Where are you studying?

[tooki]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

Mac's "intelligent" multilingual characters are a bit too smart for their own good. If you press "Ctl-i", you get a smart carat, under which you can place something like an 'e' or 'i' by just typing it (ê, î). But it doesn't work for numbers because those aren't "valid" characters...

It's not that they're intelligent characters, it's that there's no Unicode for those. Every accented letter is a separate Unicode glyph, the Mac's "dead keys" system of entering accents is just an aid to type those accented letter glyphs -- the Mac is not making them out of separate letters and accents, despite the way you enter them.

I don't know exactly how professional publishers do it, but I suspect it's the old-fashioned way of manually kerning the accent to lie all the way above another letter.

[ghporter]

I figured it was something like lacking a Unicode character to slide into the space, but I didn't have the right words when I posted...

[Gavin]

Maybe you can fake it with a font.

I found these with a quick search:
http://www.music-notation.info/en/co...usicfonts.html

http://www.efn.org/~bch/AboutFonts.html

http://websitetips.com/fonts/music/

[thechidz]

I wonder if there is software that can do it or some website you could copy the text from?

[Simon]

If you use LaTeX it's as easy as \hat{character} where character can be pretty much anything.

LaTeX

And the editor of choice on OS X: TeXShop.

Both free.

[thechidz]

Originally Posted by Simon 

If you use LaTeX it's as easy as \hat{character} where character can be pretty much anything.

LaTeX

And the editor of choice on OS X: TeXShop.

Both free.

is this an add-on for word processors or something?

[Cottontail]

Hi everyone. Thanks for all the replies. I've decided to work around the problem by saying "third/fourth/millionth scale degree" when necessary.

thechidz: I'm a grad student at Central Michigan. It's way too cold right now.

Simon: Thanks for the tip. It came a bit too late this time, but I'll file it away in case I have to write another paper about Schenker. I know a bit of LaTeX, but it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to take some time later and really learn it.

[thechidz]

cool, where did you do undergrad?

[ghporter]

Oh come on! It's going to get all the way up to 27˚ in Mount Pleasant today. <shiver!!!!> This is one reason I left Michigan when I did. Today in San Antonio it's supposed to get to 72˚ (and most native San Antonians will wear parkas as if it's cold or something!).

I've done something like what thechidz has mentioned and found appropriate characters online, but it was a MAJOR hassle. Of course if you know of web pages that specifically have the characters you need, that's different. Good luck with the paper, and STAY WARM!

[Simon]

Originally Posted by thechidz 

is this an add-on for word processors or something?

No. It's actually the word processor.

[TETENAL]

3̂

It's possible in TextEdit. Copy the above into a TextEdit document. It doesn't work in Pages or Safari though. I assume that's a bug in those two programs.

[PER3]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

3̂

It's possible in TextEdit. Copy the above into a TextEdit document. It doesn't work in Pages or Safari though. I assume that's a bug in those two programs.

How did you get that in TextEdit? The smart caret doesn't seem to work. Did you find it in Character Palette? How do you do it for other numbers?

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by PER3 

How did you get that in TextEdit? The smart caret doesn't seem to work. Did you find it in Character Palette? How do you do it for other numbers?

Just copy what you see in his post and paste it into your document in TextEdit. On the other hand, I too would like to know how he got that particular character assembled to begin with...

[CharlesS]

The Unicode character 0x0302 is the combining circumflex accent. You can look it up in the code tables in the Character Palette and insert it after any character, and it'll put a circumflex over it. You can make a lot of silly-looking characters this way: [̂, +̂, ;̂, etc.

Also, if you set your keyboard layout to U.S. Extended instead of plain old U.S., then you can type the combining circumflex accent using Option-Shift-6 after you type the character you want to put it above. So to make a 1̂, you would first type a 1, then Option-Shift-6. Voilà!

[ghporter]

Like this: 8̂? Yes indeed! Now I see some use for the US Extended keyboard...

[thechidz]

1fl is that what the fl symbol is?

[thechidz]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

The Unicode character 0x0302 is the combining circumflex accent. You can look it up in the code tables in the Character Palette and insert it after any character, and it'll put a circumflex over it. You can make a lot of silly-looking characters this way: [̂, +̂, ;̂, etc.

Also, if you set your keyboard layout to U.S. Extended instead of plain old U.S., then you can type the combining circumflex accent using Option-Shift-6 after you type the character you want to put it above. So to make a 1̂, you would first type a 1, then Option-Shift-6. Voilà!

this isnt working for me. all I get is this: 1fl

[CharlesS]

That's because your keyboard layout is set to U.S., not U.S. Extended. Go to the International preference pane, go to Input Menu, activate the U.S. Extended keyboard layout, and check "Show input menu in menu bar." Then, in the input menu (it looks like a US flag by default), set the keyboard layout to U.S. Extended, and then option-shift-6 will get you the combining circumflex.

If you'd rather not do all that, you can also use the character palette, search for "combining circumflex accent", and enter it that way too. It's just that I find the US Extended layout to be easier to use once you get it all set up, so that's what I use.

[thechidz]

ĉool thânks

[CharlesS]

well, you don't need the combining circumflex for ĉ and â, since those two exist in Unicode already.