Sharps, Flats, and Naturals in Word
As a music educator, I sometimes need to use the musical sharp and flat symbols in text documents. I'd like to add these symbols to the Times New Roman font in Microsoft Word by copying and pasting them from a music font on my system. Is there a way this can be done?
You can't copy and paste characters from one font to another without an advanced font-manipulation utility. If you did, you'd find that others viewing your documents wouldn't see the added characters, since they don't have the modified fonts. And modifying the font could get you into copyright trouble.
But there are ways to ease the process of entering these characters. First, you can learn their Unicode values and enter them by typing the code in Word, then pressing Alt-X. The flat, natural, and sharp symbols are 266d, 266e, and 266f, respectively. As you point out, these characters are not present in Times New Roman, but Word should select a font that does include them. On this system, it chose Lucida Sans Unicode. Another possibility is to select Symbol from the Insert menu, find a font that includes the desired character and select it, and click the Shortcut Key button to assign it a shortcut, perhaps Alt-Ctrl-Shift-F for flat and so on. Now you can easily insert the needed characters.
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