Cipher score typesetting
Dear MuseScore developers,
I'm a Chinese music player. When I surf the web a few days ago, I was so excited to find such a good score editor without any charge! I would like to express my sincere thanks to your invaluable efforts!
As mentioned, I play Chinese music which uses cipher notation to represent the note. For an example, "1", "2", "3", "4", "5", "6" and "7" means "do", "re", "mi", "fa", "so", "la" and " ti" respectively. I hope such a cipher notation score editing features could be added to the MuseScore!
This musical notation not only used by Chinese music, but also under other situation, like harmonica band, choir and etc. So if such feature could be added to the MuseScore, I believe many cipher notation user would choose MuseScore as their score editor. (p.s. I can't find a good cipher notation score editor)
I sincerely hope that you can consider my request. Looking forward to hearing good news from you!
Thanks and regards,
Marcus Lo
Comments
Marcus,
I just did a web search and found this post. Do you have any PDFs or images of Chinese cipher music that you could post here as examples?
I'm currently working with some colleagues to create a unicode font and keyboarding solution for the Indonesian cipher notation, which could be used in any word processor. My understanding is that the Chinese notation is quite similar, although it uses underlines and double underlines instead of overlines and double overlines. We are building support for that into the font in hopes that it will be useful to people like you.
Do you know if there are more differences between the Chinese and Indonesian systems? (If you post some PDFs or images, that could help answer this question.)
Would you need to be able to output BOTH western staff notation and cipher notation for the same file? (Our solution wouldn't be able to do this.)
I've attached a list of the characters and character combinations we need for Indonesian. Apart from the overline/underline issue, would this work for Chinese too?
At the moment, our solution is mostly focused on the numbers themselves, but we hope to add support for a small subset of symbols from here (unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D100.pdf) too.
J C
In reply to We're working on something similar for Indonesian by jvcoombs
Great ! Your font will be open source ? And could be integrated in future version of MuseScore?
In reply to Great ! Your font will be by [DELETED] 5
Yes. Assuming things proceed according to plan, it will be based on the Doulos SIL font,
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=DoulosSILfont
which is freely available under an open font license.
That's the current plan anyway.
J C
In reply to We're working on something similar for Indonesian by jvcoombs
Hi J C,
First of all, sorry for such late reply since I was busy with some orchestra and personal staff...
Thanks very much for your kind reply and so glad that you have such a similar idea. There're some major differences between Indonesian cipher score system and the Chinese one. Here's a link of a cipher score of a Chinese song (orchestra score): http://www.sooopu.com/html/66/66289.html
What I want is not only the use cipher notation editing function, but also the cipher notation "typesetting" function. Actually, several years ago, a Chinese music enthusiast in Taiwan had created a font set used in MS Word to create simple cipher score for Chinese music. However, the outcome seems not to be nice.
So I hope MuseScore can finally integrate the cipher score editing and typesetting function into it. If possible, I hope there would be a translation function between cipher score and western score!! Do I too greedy? :P
Looking forward to your favourable reply.
Thanks and regards,
Marcus Lo
In reply to Hi J C, First of all, sorry by marcuslsw
Hi again,
Well, a lot of time has passed (my apologies), but I did want to follow up here and let you know that the font is now available for download from a public site:
http://scripts.sil.org/CipherMusic
This smart font uses Graphite for rendering itself, so this will limit the applications that you can successfully use it in. (Even if it used OpenType, that would limit your options as well.) We recommend LibreOffice Writer to our users, and that's all we've tested it with.
In order to keyboard the data, we're using an InKey keyboard (http://inkeysoftware.com/). If InKey is is polished beyond beta phase and made publicly available, it will be free. Other options would be to create your own keyboard using MSKLC (free) or Keyman (not free). (Be aware that the SMP characters may require special handling; e.g. I'm told that MSKLC can only handle these using surrogate pairs.)
J C