cipher music

[Martin Hosken]

Dear All,

Cipher Music is a variety of notation systems that are used, particularly in 
Asia, by many millions of people. The structure is relatively simple with each 
note having a letter or number identifier and diacritics to indicate octave, 
length, etc.

But, just as with western notation, this stuff is hard to typeset and lilypond, 
being such a power tool should be able to eat it up.

I enclose my first attempt at this. But I would value some help in making it 
look nicer and not requiring raise/lower hackery to get the music lines not to 
clash. So all improvements are welcome.

The approach I have taken is to extend the note-names engraver slightly so that 
it can output duration, and then to reparse the note name to convert it into 
the required output. I enclose the patch and sample document. I propose the 
patch for addition to lilypond in a subsequent version. It's not very big and 
it shouldn't break anything.

Particular questions on the .ly front:

1. How do I get the voices not to smash into each other?
2. How do I get the barlines of the right thickness and height?

Todo.

1. Add key normalisation to CMaj or Am and insert indicative text to that 
effect.
2. Fix Doulos SIL to add better diacritic rendering on numbers
3. Do some user testing

Scary thoughts.

1. People like the - (for time doubling) to spread into the spare space
2. Underlining should act like beaming just like, but completely different to, 
beaming in Western notation.

Yours,
Martin

duration_patch.diff
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Need.ly
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