Font and instructions for improved New Real Book style chord names

I use Windows Vista, and the procedure to install ttf fonts is a bit different, as follows:
Click on the Start button in the lower left corner, then choose Settings (sorry, my Windows speaks German to me, and there it is 'Systemsteuerung'
From there you choose 'Schriftarten' (don't know the exact English word, but I think it would be 'fonts')
The system fonts folder will open. Drop the Files menu and select 'New font' (Neue Schriftart). This opens a file selector. Navigate to the unzipped archive file and double click on the .ttf file. This is where you will answer 'Install'.
That's how I did it. Will now open MuseScore and see what I have got.

Dralex

These look really nice - thanks for doing that! I guess the main other thing that would still need to be done is to make a customized chords.xml so the chords would parse the way they are spelled. That is, so you can type Cmi7 to get Cmi7.

As for the chord themselves, I personally like to use parens around the ma7 in Cmima7 and similar chords so they come out Cmi(ma7), and I do prefer mi7b5 over the half-dim symbol (thanks for anticipating that option), but aside from that, it looks ready to go for me!

Unfortunately Jochen Pietsch's fonts use a license that is not compatible with the GNU General Public License that MuseScore uses (which allows commercial use).

Busy transcribing Mas Que Nada... ;-) But I wanted to give feedback, since your post and the thread was very helpful. btw Muse guys, can't you choose something more creative looking the boring old Times New Roman?

Downloaded this version and used the instructions posted above onto my Ubuntu system (Natty 11.04) and the chord formatting worked perfectly. Just needed to tweak one thing - couldn't understand the curly bracket "{" instead of a good old "m" when I put minor in, so read through the post again, went in and found the relevant part in the xml file and changed the behaviour there (for those that want to do it, the file explains how its just a question of commenting and un-commenting a couple of lines).

I've included the file below, here's the diff.

huang@revo:~/downloads/muse$ diff realbookchords.xml /usr/share/mscore-1.0/styles/realbookchords.xml
25d24
< -->
29c28
< -->
32d30
< -->
huang@revo:~/downloads/muse$

Did you try putting the exclamation mark back?

The original looks like:

<!-- half-diminished symbol - uncomment one only
			"&#187;"			striked circle
			"}7b5"				superscript  m7b5
-->
    <!ENTITY half_dim "&#187;">
<!--
    <!ENTITY half_dim "}7b5">
-->

If you want to uncomment the other one then it would look like:

<!-- half-diminished symbol - uncomment one only
			"&#187;"			striked circle
			"}7b5"				superscript  m7b5
-->
<!--
    <!ENTITY half_dim "&#187;">
-->
    <!ENTITY half_dim "}7b5">

What specifically didn't work? In other words, what did you do, what did you expect to see happen, and what happened instead?

In general, to get customized chord symbols you need to do these things:

1) have a customized XML file to describe how the chords should *look* - in this case, realbookchords.xml
2) have a customized XML file to describe what you need to *type* to get those chords - in this case, chords.xml
3) tell MuseScore to use these files (by setting the appropriate style option to use realbookschords.xml, and by restartng MuseScore after replacing the stock chords.xml with your customized one)
4) have the approriate fonts installed
5) tell MuseScore to *use* those fonts via the text style (this can be done within the XML file; not sure if realbookchords.xml does this or not)
6) enter a chord symbol that MuseScore recognizes according to #2

Depending on what went wrong, I'm guessing you didn't enter a chord symbol MuseScore recognizes according to whatever chords.xml you have installed. it's also possible you needed to set the chordname text style to use the realbook font and you didn't do that.

BTW, if you have trouble getting these XML files working, you can also try this customized XML file I created, which is based on the one here but is designed to be even easier to customize and also to not require any additional fonts:

http://musescore.org/en/node/9772

It turns out that you can include information on how chords should be typed within the same XML file you use to control how they are displayed, so I did that in my version. So you won't have to replace your existing chords.xml and restart MuseScore with my version. But because it doesn't depend on any additional fonts, it doesn't look quite as slick as franck102's in some respects.

Compatible in what way? MuseScore cannot open Finale files or vice versa, but you can transfer them by exporting/importing in the standard MusicXML files. Things don't come over perfectly, but it gets you started.

If you have more specific questions on using MuseScore, please start a new thead in the Support forum - and read this first: http://musescore.org/node/77

For the record, this thread dates from 10 years ago, and that's also about how long it's been since you needed any such workarounds :-). All versions of MuseScore for many years now have all of this built in, just by selecting "Jazz" in Format / Style / Chord Symbols, or by using any of the jazz templates when creating your score.