> The new editor which I'm using in the OS X version of BarFly supports > UTF16 (Unicode) and bi-directional text, so at some point I'll > probably be able to do languages which read from right to left. > It occurred to me to wonder how music is represented in these. > > If you have a song with aligned words in Hebrew or Arabic, does the > staff notation get reversed too to match the words? And in that > case would the lines of abc have to read right to left too?
The Arabic and Hebrew books I've got have the staff notation left to right as in Latin languages; the text underlay seemed rather approximate in the Arabic, quite precise in the Hebrew, but in each case you were supposed to read the text backwards. How about vertically, the way it is in Arbeau's Orchesographie and in Labanotation? - you might want that for Mongolian too. (Can you express Labanotation signs in Unicode?) I suspect that doing it right in Arabic is a can of worms without parallel in any other language. Look at the Nisus documentation for some of the funnies you get. Meanwhile, there isn't a heck of a lot of point in even trying without having a proper way to write microtonal modality in the music. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760 <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack> * food intolerance data & recipes, Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files, and my CD-ROM "Embro, Embro". To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
