Re: Multi-byte characters in Lyrics

[Maurits Lamers]

Op 26 okt. 2017, om 16:19 heeft Thomas Morley <address@hidden> het volgende geschreven:

2017-10-26 15:15 GMT+02:00 Maurits Lamers <address@hidden>:

Hi,

I am writing an extension to lilypond to support generating some basic braille inside an includable .ly file.

Iirc, there were already some attempts to support it.
Did you search the archieves?

yes, nothing substantial as far as I have been able to figure out, or it is related with the current project.

Why LilyPond 2.14.? It's _very_ old and very outdated.

In order to have a development path, we intended to limit the initial support to single voice music. 

We currently have a library of around 1000 songs with both single voice music versions, as well as four part choir versions and accompaniments.

This library was made to work with 2.14 and it looks like it might be a rather complex process to convert everything.

For another thing up to now only guile-1.8 is supported.
I've an experimental branch where guile-2.2 is used and LilyPond is
more or less working. Look at the difference (all done in a native
guile-prompt, no LilyPond):

guile> (version)
"1.8.8"
guile> (define strg "’s He")
guile> (map string (string->list strg))
("�" "\x80" "�" "s" " " "H" "e")
guile>

As opposed to:

scheme@(guile-user)> (version)
$4 = "2.2.2.5-96c9"
scheme@(guile-user)> (define strg "’s He")
scheme@(guile-user)> (map string (string->list strg))
$5 = ("’" "s" " " "H" "e")

The Guile documentation suggest loading unicode support through (use-modules (ice9 unicode)) but that module is not part of Guile as distributed with Lilypond...

At the same time this makes me wonder how complex it would be to update our library. Nevertheless, our implementation should run on a "normal" distribution of Lilypond. So, for the moment the question still stands: how could I deal with this? Is it possible to add the unicode module to Lilypond somehow? 

I checked the distribution for guile 1.8.7 and couldn't find a unicode.scm file in the ice9 folder, nor a iconv.scm for that matter.

cheers

Maurits