Hebrew language

Here are some more mock-ups that will make sense to "lefties" like me. (Example 3 is like the original mock-up).

(The more observant among you will realise that these don't really work since English isn't a right-to-left language, but hopefully you get the idea.)

Example 1: Current behaviour for a right-to-left language

Very hard to read. Music reads left-to-right so the syllables have to be written in reverse order.

Example 2: Basic mirroring - flip everything!

Not much help in terms of readability but probably quite easy to code.

Example 3: Mirror symbols, don't mirror text. (As suggested above.)

Much easier to read and probably not too difficult to code because the relative positions of all of the symbols have not changed.

Example 4: Reverse the order of all text and symbols without mirroring.

Easy to read but probably hard to code because the relative arrangement of symbols has changed.

(This final example shows quite clearly why these examples don't really work - the text starts on the left but the music starts on the right! But you get the idea...)

Any thoughts?

FYI you can also attach scores to forum posts, you don't need to email them directly.

It seems to me that a view or style option to *instantly* switch between mirrored and non-mirrored (default) could be very helpful for many people and give MuseScore a huge edge over the competition in this area. In this digital age people are printing music less often and instead using tablets and e-readers, so mirroring can be made completely optional at point of use, not just at the point of creation. I would hesitate to call this an "accessibility" option, but it is analogous to other accessibility features like braille in that it would provide a semi-standard notation to help people who have difficulty with standard notation.

However, if you think this is unnecessary or undesirable then I'm sure that non of the developers will complain about not having to implement it ;)

Hi Ofra, thank you for sharing all your insights. We have enough information to dive into it. I'll come back to you as soon as we have something to say.

@Ofra. While the boys seek a solution perhaps it can be useful take advantage of a little trick: https://musescore.org/en/node/21522

Thank you Ofra. We got enough to chew on :)

Ofra, if you would like to add the missing translations to the menus then you can do so yourself here: http://translate.musescore.org/

Read this for help getting started: https://musescore.org/en/handbook/helping-and-improve-translation

Seems in the Hebrew translation many of the "%x" (x being a number) got lost, These are placeholders and need to be kept. Same for puntiation (e.g. colon) I think and also for line breaks.
Example:
"Open File⏎ %1⏎ failed:" got translated to "פתח קובץ⏎ נכשל",
here the %1, line feed, and the final colon is missing.

Edit: some html stuff got lost too

Edit2: see https://www.transifex.com/musescore/musescore/translate/#he/musescore/3… I've tried my best to plug the missing %x stuff in, could someone please double check?

Hi Ofra, we haven't been able to check into it yet but it's good you bring it back to our attention. Hopefully we'll find some time in the coming weeks. Keeping you posted.

Hi Ofra,

Did you manage to join the Hebrew translation team at https://www.transifex.com/musescore/musescore/ ? If not, please join so you can directly improve the Hebrew translation in MuseScore.

We are moving towards a 2.0.3 release so it would be great to have an improve Hebrew translation as well.

Let me know if you need help.

As for the problem regarding R2L text in a score, we don't have a solution yet. Still working on that.

Hi Ofragon, sorry to read Transifex is too complicated for you. There are 8 people in the Hebrew translator community so hopefully they'll be able to build further upon your work. I will contact them and let them know about this thread and about the improvements you proposed. Thanks for all your help thus far.

This is IMHO a Problem with Transifex, it doesn't have a methode for a translators group to communicate. And another option, a subforun in https://musescore.org/he/forum doesn't existieren yet seither, so maybe you try to start a diskussion topic in https://musescore.org/en/forum/9 and, via the contact feature in Transifex, make this known to the hebrwe translators.

As Jojo noted out, the Transifex discussion tools are not hugely helpful. I did leave a post for all Hebrew translators pointing to your forum post here. https://www.transifex.com/musescore/teams/1397/discussions/14568/ (you need to be signed into Transifex and be member of the Hebrew team to see this link).

I want to open a Hebrew forum on musescore.org, so could you do me a favour and translate these couple of lines into Hebrew?

* General questions and problems
** Before posting a question, it's advised to search first if there is an answer already.
* Documentation & translation
** Discussions related to the handbook of translations of MuseScore

These strings will be used to create the Hebrew forum.

@Oded: Don't assume that, just because a feature is not useful to you, it is not useful to anyone.

Also, nobody suggested that mirroring would be the default. I see no reason why it couldn't be included as an option. The beauty of digital scores, unlike paper copies, is that the layout can be changed to suit the preference of the user on the fly.

Many singer in amateur choirs do not read music, or are new to music, and only look at the music for the lyrics (they pick up the notes from the people around them). It could potentially lower the barrier of entry significantly if music was laid out in the way people learned to read written text.

Apparently mirroring is already an option in some scoring programs, so I am surprised by the hostility which my suggestion of adding it to MuseScore as an optional feature has been met. However, if there really is nobody who feels they would benefit from this, then I can't see any developers complaining about having one less task to do.

Could we keep the conversation in English? Otherwise, the MuseScore developers will not be able to follow and make up their mind while improving the software for R2L languages. Thanks for your consideration.

Btw conversations in Hebrew are welcome in the Hebrew forum at https://musescore.org/he/forum

Dear All,

Any updates about the mirroring feature of the score.
I have been struggling to find a way to do that without any success.

Regards,
Jean-Pierre

I have recently seen a book which shows music written from right to left (The notes themselves, as in some examples above, not just the lyrics).

The book is from the period after the state of Israel was founded, about 60 years ago. Some people thought that this might be a good practice.
But this idea was abandoned and apart from this book I have never seen any music written like this (including Hebrew an Arabic music).

There are many musicians in Israel, writing and performing music in many styles (western and oriental), and all the music is written from left to right.

I still hold my opinion that it is a waste of developer resources to develop the mirroring feature, and it will be much more beneficial to use these resources to develop other important features.