Re: Inputting special symbols

[Erik Sandberg]

On Thursday 12 January 2006 23.27, Gilles wrote:
> [The list moderator rejected a previous post with this message;
> so I had to remove the "pdf" attachment.  Hopefully someone will
> be kind enough to try and compile the attached lily file, and tell
> me whether he gets the same result as I.]
>
> > >Wouldn't it be more logical to do that by default, instead of having
> > >to call a function explicitely to remove something (space) which wasn't
> > >there in the first place?
> >
> > The current behaviour is certainly logical and intuitive. Your proposal
> > would
> > imply that a markup such as
> > \markup{\bold Allegro molto }
> > would appear as Allegromolto!
>
> I would write the above as
>
>   \markup{\bold "Allegro molto" }

I think Mats meant that only "Allegro" should be bold.

> as this is what is really intended (2 words separated by a space).
> The fact that lilypond allows "bare" (unquoted) strings *is* the
> syntactic sugar.
> [The possibility of leaving out 2 quote characters, at the expense
> of having to implement a \concatenate function, is not a gain.]

I agree that it is a bit too difficult now to leave out the space between 
words. Ideally, both ways (without space and with space) should be possible 
to do easily. However, the choice of default behaviour is IMHO a difficult 
decision; there are some problems with 

Because of the bounding-box thing (whitespace is stripped at the end of 
strings; according to Han-Wen this is not lily's fault), there needs to be a 
command that separates words with a space: Without lily's current command, it 
would be difficult to create the space between \bold "Allegro" and "molto" in 
Mats' example.

There is also a need for a command that separates strings without a space, and 
there is a need for \concatenate. (Concatenating strings is not the same as 
using a 0 space between words: the latest release supports kerning and 
melismas).

> While in the second case, lilypond seems to be confused by the mixing
> of right-to-left (parentheses) and left-to-right (Hebrew) characters,
> so that the text line is "scrambled" (see attached "pdf" [1]).

I don't know how mixing of right-to-left and left-to-right is normally done. 
Is it completely clear that one way of doing it is The One Way of doing it? 
(I've never written right-to-left texts so I don't know)

> [1] Hopefully you will be able to "see" the Hebrew characters; I don't,
>     neither in "gv" nor in "xpdf", but they appear when the page is
>     printed on a PostScript printer.  Does this confirm a bug in "gs"
>     (latest on Debian is version 8.15)?

works fine in Ubuntu/breezy with gs-afpl 8.50

-- 
Erik