Flute Fonts / Finger Diagram Fonts

To assist people who wish to write out sheet music with finger diagrams, this page provides a set of fonts that have high-quality finger diagrams for the notes on these instruments. Fonts are currently available for Native American Flutes (six-hole, five-hole, and Hopi flutes) as well as for the Fujara.

The finger diagrams generally look like this:

Here is a reduced-size example of a page scored with these finger diagram fonts, typeset in Finale 2004:

The fonts are in TrueType format (.TTF) and have been tested on Microsoft Windows. Use on Mac systems is not specifically supported, but may work.

These fonts have been used for typesetting many transcriptions for publication, including the Mary Youngblood transcription books that I did.

These fonts are freely distributable. However, any document (printed, electronic, or otherwise) that makes use of any of these fonts must carry the inscription:

Finger diagrams courtesy of Clint Goss, www.NAFTracks.com

The Fonts

Five fonts are provided in the downloadable ZIP file. They are:

NAFTracks Six Hole - A full set of finger diagrams for six-hole Native Flutes, including half-hole diagrams, smaller diagrams for grace notes, and even diagrams for a drone flute. This font can also be used for diatonic flutes. This font also has finger diagrams for five-hole Native Flutes.

NAFTracks Five Hole - A full set of finger diagrams for six-hole Native Flutes, including half-hole diagrams, smaller diagrams for grace notes, and even diagrams for a drone flute.

NAFTracks Hopi Five Hole - A full set of finger diagrams for five-hole Hopi flutes.

NAFTracks Six Hole to Diatonic - A specialized font that allows fast conversion from a document scored with the Six Hole font to be re-scored for a Diatonic flute simply by swapping the underlying font for the finger diagrams.

NAFTracks Fujara - A font for the Slovakian Fujara.

Examples of the Fonts

The fonts have full-size finger diagrams such as as well as smaller diagrams to represent grace notes. Here is an example of a grace note preceeding a regular note: ... A "bark" on a Native Flute might be represented like this:

Fonts also have diagrams to represent a drone portion of a flute, in two forms ("open" and "closed"): and

Here's an example of the five hole font: ... and the Hopi five-hole font:

The fujara font has finger diagrams that look like this: ... There are also diagrams to represent effects that are specific to the Slovakian fujara: a scatter before the note: ... and a woosh after the note:

Conversion Between Fonts

The four fonts for Native Flutes are designed to let you easily convert between Six Hole and Five Hole versions of the same transcription. If you have a transcription which uses the Six Hole font, simply change the font of all the finger diagrams to Five Hole. This would be done the way you might change text from Times Roman to Arial. Then your transcription would have diagrams for five-hole Native Flutes.

The same applies to changing to a diatonic flute ... the Six Hole To Diatonic font is specifically designed for this purpose.

Inverted Fonts

As of Version 1.03, August 29, 2008, there are two additional fonts that show the finger diagrams with the breath hole at the bottom. I call these "inverted", although you may consider these the normal depiction of finger diagrams. There are also two new PDF "Font Key" documents which show how the letters of the keyboard map to the finger diagrams in this font.

As with the Conversion Between Fonts described above, you can convert directly between the upright and inverted versions of the Five Hole and Six Hole fonts. If you publish music with these finger diagrams, I encourage you to include versions with both the upright and inverted finger diagrams, to allow use by as many people as possible.

Font Keys

When using these finger diagram fonts, you will typically be typing a single keyboard letter to get one finger diagram. However, the correspondence between the letters on the keyboard and the finger diagrams is not obvious.

To help with this mapping, there are PDF "Font Key" documents included in the ZIP file, one for each of the fonts. These documents provide the mapping between each of the finger diagrams and the keyboard letters. Here is a direct link to the Font Key Document for the Six Hole Font.

In some cases, extended characters are needed for a font. If the "character" below a finger diagram in the Font Key documents says (for example) 123, then here's what you do to get that character on a Windows system:

• Ensure that the NumLock key is engaged
• Hold down the ALT key
• On the numeric key pad, press "0" (the digit zero) then the three digits shown ("1" then "2" then "3" in this example).
• Release the ALT key

You should then see the desired character in your document.

Before working with any of these fonts, it is a good idea to print out the appropriate Font Key for that font to have alongside your work for reference. At first, it might not seem like there is a coherent layout to the finger diagrams, but after you work with them for a while you will begin to see the pattern.

Microsoft Word

An easy way to write down your songs is to use a word processor such as Microsoft Word^® and simply write out the finger diagrams to the song. You could also include lyrics if the song has them.

Here's a sample of a very straightforward transcription done by Ellie Lehota Ma'ayan:

The lines of lyrics are in a regular 16-point Georgia font, and the lines of finger diagrams are in 72-point "NAFTracks Six Hole" font.

If you plan on sending such a transcription to another person using Microsoft Word, you will need to embed the fonts into the document. This allows the person receiving the document to view it, even if they do not have the finger diagram fonts installed on their machine.

To embed fonts into a Microsoft Word document:

1. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Save tab.
2. Select the Embed TrueType fonts check box.
3. Save the document.

Here is the Microsoft Word Document of Then Came The Rain for you to test out on your system.

Image Files

In addition to the TrueType fonts and Font Key PDF files, the ZIP file contains a limited set of JPG format image files for use in places where changing fonts is inconvenient (such as on this page).

Download and Installation

Here is a general outline of how to access and install the fonts on Windows systems:

1. Click on the "Download the ZIP file ..." link below. You should see a dialog box similar to this:
    
   
    
   
2. Click on [Save].
   
   
3. On the "Save As", navigate to the desktop (or some other location you prefer) and save the ZIP file there.
   
   
4. Locate the file on your desktop (or other saved location) and open the ZIP file you have just saved (typically by double-clicking on it).
   
   
5. You should see a display of all the files contained within the ZIP file. You can now open any of the files from within the ZIP file or copy them from the ZIP file to other locations.
   
   
6. You generally install fonts on Windows by copying the font files (with extension .TTF) to your Fonts directory. On most windows systems this is located at C:/Windows/Fonts.
   
   
7. After installation, the NAFTracks fonts should show up in any font-list in any program that allows you to change fonts. For transcriptions in Finale, I simply set the lyrics font to be the font for the appropriate finger diagram.

Since I am not a Macintosh user, I can't offer specific directions for the Mac. However, here are two items of feedback that I have received from Mac folks:

From Gary Cope:

I have a Mac - a powerbook PPC with Leopard installed (the latest version). I have MS Office 2008 for Mac. I went into Font Book and installed the fonts and then validated them - then I opened Word 2008 and formated the font. They showed up and they worked the way I suspect you wanted them to.

 

From James Bonacci:

Just tried these fonts out on a Mac (running OS 10.5). The work fine with MS Office for Mac! Mac users can use the FontBook application to install these fonts to the system after unzipping the file. FontBook does not display the fonts, but it does recognized them. Once the fonts are installed to the system, they can be used in MS Office and other Mac applications that use fonts.

Support

The fonts are distributed free of charge, but do not come with support. There are many Web resources on font installation and use on various operating systems.

Version Information

Version 1.01

Developed in 2002 for production of the Mary Youngblood transcription books.

 

August 26, 2008 at 7AM EDT: Phone call from Roderick Zeig in Switzerland about fonts for the Fujara finally nudges me to organize the NAF and Fujara fonts for public distribution.

 

Version 1.02

Publicly released August 26, 2008 for general use, including 5 fonts.

 

Version 1.03

August 29, 2008: added inverted fonts for showing Six Hole and Five Hole NAF finger diagrams with the breath hole at the bottom. Also added Font Keys PDFs for these new fonts as well as a FontReadMe.pdf file which is a copy of this page.

 

Version 1.04

September 30, 2009: added several diagrams to the six-hole and five-hole fonts.

 

Version 1.05

October 23, 2009: added several more diagrams to the six-hole and six-hole inverted fonts.

 

Download

Here is a link to a ZIP file that contains all the needed TTF font files, Font Key PDF files, and JPG image files. Please remember that any document (printed, electronic, or otherwise) that makes use of any of these fonts must carry the inscription:

Finger diagrams courtesy of Clint Goss, www.NAFTracks.com

«Download the Current Version of the ZIP File - Version 1.05»

Older Versions

ZIP File Version 1.02

ZIP File Version 1.03

ZIP File Version 1.04

©2005-2009 Clint Goss.
All rights reserved.
Site Map