Greetings all you ABC'ers
I don't know much about music, but was asked several weeks ago to research
typesetting music. My goal is pretty simple. I need to typeset notes for a
dombra (Kazakh national instrument - two strings) with lyrics. Doing the
notes was a breeze thanks to abc2ps. The lyrics were in Cyrillic. A search
of past traffic on this list only turned up questions about it without
answers. I joined the list and lurked for a few weeks before posting.
I fiddled around a bit and I have an answer. It took reading up on fonts and
postscript language and a whole lot of tries. I found that if ISOLatin1
Encoding isn't specified, the encoding native to the specified font will be
used in postscript level 2.
A Type1 font with Cyrillic is needed, and it must be specified wherever you
want Cyrillic letters. There is a problem if you also want Latin extended
letters... can't have everything can we?
Then type the words you want in Cyrillic into your abc file either the
letters straight or the \'octal' stuff.
There are two options for un-specifying ISOLatin1:
In abc2ps source I edited the syms.h file commenting out the
" /Encoding ISOLatin1Encoding def\n"
line - this will break the postscript level 1 compatibility. This solution
works for both the Windose and Linux environments.
If you don't want to do that, can't recompile things, don't have source
code, or want to use abcm2ps instead, then there's another way.
With a text editor edit the .ps file. Delete the
/Encoding ISOLatin1Encoding def
line for every instance of your Cyrillic font.
In abcm2ps, the .ps output code only lists this once.
I also hacked at Guido Gonzato's "Otche Nash" and could send it to the list
if you want a "proof of concept". It stands to reason that this could work
with about any font.
jonathan
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