Re: Non-latin scripts howto?

[Richard Schoeller]

Gilles,

I've had little luck edit Hebrew (actually Yiddish) in emacs.  I do all
of the editing of Lilypond except for the right-to-left markup in emacs.
Then I use gedit with great success for the Yiddish markup.  It seems to
keep the directionality things right and saves properly in UTF-8.  I am
using 2.6.

The main thing that I have not gotten to work are the combining
characters.  Unlike Hebrew, which is technically correct without the
vowel markings, Yiddish requires the vowels.  When I have tried to
include them, Lilypond places them as though they are separate
characters.  They should actually be placed in the same character
location as the preceding character.

The other thing that I have had problems with is combinations of
right-to-left and left-to-right text on the same line.  For example 

titleMarkup = \markup {
  \override #'(font-name . "Serif") \override #'(font-size . 12)
{ "אדעסע בולגאר 3" } }

comes up with the 3 over the top of reish instead of separated by a
space.

These behaviors are covered by the directional rendering rules in
Unicode, but almost every rendering engine has some problems.  For
example, Mozilla can either place vowels or trope on a character but not
both.  The second combining character gets pushed to the next character
position.

There are some hints that you may be able to work around this in 2.7
with the text-direction property, but I haven't tried it yet.

You can pull a copy of my sources from:

http://schoeller.hsd1.ma.comcast.net/scores/klezmersources.tar.gz

Dick

On Mon, 2005-11-14 at 00:00 +0100, Gilles wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I'd like to input/display non-latin characters (specifically: Hebrew)
> as presented in the test document:
> 
> http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.6/input/regression/out-www/lily-1601320616.ly
> 
> But I didn't get very far :-{
> 
> I use the emacs editor. I have installed (Debian) the recommended
> "emacs-intl-fonts" package, as well as the "xfonts-intl-european".
> I downloaded the above file but emacs doesn't display the non-latin
> characters (white rectangular boxes instead). [Files are saved as
> "utf-8".]
> 
> What is the way to input non-latin characters within emacs and have
> it display them correctly?
> 
> As a workaround, I wrote the title of the piece using the "katoob"
> bidirectional editor (which displays the characters correctly); but
> after running lilypond, the postscript file displayed blank spaces
> instead of Hebrew characters.
> 
> 
> Thanks for your help,
> Gilles
> 
> 
> 
-- 
Dick Schoeller
mailto:address@hidden
http://schoeller.hsd1.ma.comcast.net/
781.449.5476