Re: How can I avoid unicode and use Latin1? (Was: Wrong characters with jEdit)

[stk]

On Fri, 2 Sep 2005, Mats Bengtsson wrote:

> What you have found in the source code files are some left-overs
> from version 2.4 and earlier, where LilyPond only knew about Latin1.
> If you browse through the mailing list archives, you can also find
> out why this was not a satisfactory solution if you want to promote
> the program outside western Europe.

(1) That's certainly one huge mass of "left-overs".  For a language
that allows coloured labelled noteheads, Gregorian notation, tenor
clef, and Lord knows what else, it is amazing that the developers
would choose to *remove* an existing capability.

(2) Deleting a capability is not "promotion".  Making unicode an available
*option* would be promotion, but deleting the existing ability to use
Latin-1 is not going to help you recruit users amongst the half billion
people in Western Europe and North America whose other software all
understands Latin-1.  (As a side remark, when I communicate with people in
Romania or other Eastern European locations, I have to use Latin-2;
software [mainly dictionaries] downloadable from those locations uses
Latin-2, *not* unicode.  Unicode may or may not become predominant
someday, but it certainly is not now.)

-- Tom

-------------------------------------------------------------

> address@hidden wrote:

> > The file ...\usr\share\lilypond\2.6.0\ly\paper-defaults.ly
> > sanctions Latin1 in the statement
> > inputencoding = #"latin1"
> > and later under
> > #(define text-font defaults...   ...)
> >
> > The file ...\usr\share\lilypond\2.6.0\scm\encoding.scm,
> > in the long definition
> > (define-public  latin1-coding-vector...   ...),
> > laboriously lists all 256 Latin1 characters, with  .notdef  for the
> > control characters and with a full list of the Western European
> > accented characters (agrave, aacute, acircumflex, etc.).
> >
> > There is considerable coding to enable Latin1 in the .ly and .scm files in
> > the LilyPond distribution; how can this coding be made to actually
> > function?
> >
> > Thank you for your help.
> >
> > -- Tom