Re: Hebrew Lyrics

[Richard Schoeller]

Perhaps I oversimplified a little.  If the backend text processing, TeX,
can deal with assigning glyphs to UTF-8 characters, then most of the
l-to-r UTF-8 handling will be straightforward.

There is one issue that most rendering tools that I have seen fall flat
on.  That is combining characters.  For example to write Hebrew with
vowels (and also cantillation marks) you follow the primary letter with
one or more other letters that add markings to the preceding letter. 
This would be an issue to be handled by TeX not LilyPond, I think.  I
don't really know how TeX deals with this, but Mozilla and IE both punt.

Unlike the combining characters, the r-to-l does have to be recognized
by LilyPond.  When Hebrew lyrics are attached to western music notation,
the common way to handle this is that the music flows l-to-r.  The order
of the words is also l-to-r, following the music.  However, each word is
rendered r-to-l.

BTW, the characters in the byte stream are in logical order in all of
these cases.  So if in this sentence the word HEBREW were in Hebrew
letters then the sentence should render as follows.

   "So if in this sentence the word WERBEH were in Hebrew letters then
   the sentence should render as follows."

Needless to say, the fact that the letters are in logical order causes
interesting rendering problems.  (Can you saw word-wrap?  I knew you
could.)

Dick

On Wed, 2004-02-04 at 00:26, David Rogers wrote:
> On 2004/02/03, Richard Schoeller wrote:
> 
> >It would seem to me that making LilyPond handle UTF-8 (ie: byte-stream
> >Unicode) for the left-to-right cases would be fairly straightforward.
> 
> I'm trying to follow this discussion a bit, but I'm lost now. Do you
> mean that ALL the characters of UTF-8 should be straightforward to
> handle in the left-to-right direction? Or are you just talking about
> Hebrew in particular?
> 
> Thanks
> David
> 
> 
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Dick Schoeller
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