Request for East Asian emphasis points

[Adam M. Griggs]

Hello,

I would like to request an implementation for text emphasis points native to East Asian scripts.

Please refer to the following:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emphasis_point
https://www.w3.org/TR/jlreq/#composition_of_emphasis_dots

^ specific to Japanese usage

I understand that this is a very niche feature, and I hope I'm not asking too much.

Thank you.

[Andrew Bernard]

Gosh, a very LARGE can of wriggling worms, and very interesting worms
indeed. A question, say you restrict yourself to emphasis dots for
simplicity, does OpenType support this at the moment? I am unaware of
that. Else, adding that to lilypond seems like a big project.

I am a serious student of Chinese, but I personally have never had
application for emphasis dots. From Wikipedia:

Emphasis mark: For emphasis, Chinese uses emphasis marks instead of
italic type. Each emphasis mark is a single dot placed under each
character to be emphasized (for vertical text, the dot is placed to
the right hand side of each character). Although frequent in printed
matter, emphasis marks are rare online, as they are not supported by
most word processors, and support in HTML is in development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation

Since these markings would presumably be infrequent in your scores,
sticking with dots for the moment, you could always make a markup
consisting of the character in a column with a dot/etc glyph. Roll
your own. Tedious yes. You could write a markup function to do it (ask
me, if you think this is viable). In fact, I can't think of any other
way of doing it at the moment.

Do you need an extensive range of Japanese emphasis points and techniques?

Hmmm. I suspect opening lilypond development to the very vast ocean of
CJK typography may not be on any close horizon for some time.


Andrew

On Tue, 29 Sep 2020 at 14:47, Adam M. Griggs <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I would like to request an implementation for text emphasis points native to East Asian scripts.

[Werner LEMBERG]

> I would like to request an implementation for text emphasis points
> native to East Asian scripts.

Please give an example how this is used.  And with “example” I mean a
real-word example like existing scores.

Note also that LilyPond is *not* suited for large textual works.
Support for text is thus limited to what's needed in music (lyrics,
titles, etc.).


    Werner

[Andrew Bernard]

Yes, but I can exactly see that one of the few places Japanese/Chinese
emphasis dots may be used is in lyrics, which I guess is the OP's
intent.

I was going to make the same point however, that lilypond is not
really the right tool to be attempting complex and extensive CJK
typesetting. Not in any way to downplay the OP;s intent, in the
extensive printed material I deal with from Hong Kong I can't even
recall ever having seen an emphasis dot. Hong Kong uses traditional
characters and to a large extent adheres to traditional typesetting,
and emphasis dots are a new fangled 20c invention. This could account
for the rarity. I cannot speak for current Japanese typesetting.


Andrew

On Tue, 29 Sep 2020 at 15:50, Werner LEMBERG <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Note also that LilyPond is *not* suited for large textual works.
> Support for text is thus limited to what's needed in music (lyrics,
> titles, etc.).
>
>
>     Werner

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Yes, but I can exactly see that one of the few places
> Japanese/Chinese emphasis dots may be used is in lyrics, which I
> guess is the OP's intent.

Also having a (minor) Sinology background, I've never seen emphasis
dots in scores from Taiwan, including music using the jiǎnpǔ notation.
I guess we have to wait for more details before discussing this
further...


    Werner

[Aaron Hill]

On 2020-09-28 10:43 pm, Andrew Bernard wrote:
> Since these markings would presumably be infrequent in your scores,
> sticking with dots for the moment, you could always make a markup
> consisting of the character in a column with a dot/etc glyph. Roll
> your own. Tedious yes. You could write a markup function to do it (ask
> me, if you think this is viable). In fact, I can't think of any other
> way of doing it at the moment.

I could not resist.  (:

The new \text-emphasis markup command mostly maps to the CSS style of
the same name but does not have full feature parity.  Of note, the
markup command will apply the emphasis mark to any character, whereas
the CSS standard says to omit marks for certain character classes (Z*
and P*, in particular).

Usage should be straightforward:

%%%%
\markup \concat { これは \text-emphasis  日本語 の文章です。 }
%%%%

Attached you will find a more complex series of tests and usage
examples.

(I had to include my UTF8 string splitting code in order to handle CJK
characters properly, so you will need to scroll down a bit to get to the
markup command itself.)


-- Aaron Hill

[Andrew Bernard]

Put in openlilylib Aaron! I can add it if you like.


Andrew


On 29/09/2020 11:19 pm, Aaron Hill wrote:
> I could not resist.  (:
>

[Werner LEMBERG]

> The new \text-emphasis markup command mostly maps to the CSS style
> of the same name but does not have full feature parity.  Of note,
> the markup command will apply the emphasis mark to any character,
> whereas the CSS standard says to omit marks for certain character
> classes (Z* and P*, in particular).
>
> Usage should be straightforward:
>
> %%%%
> \markup \concat { これは \text-emphasis  日本語 の文章です。 }
> %%%%
>
> Attached you will find a more complex series of tests and usage
> examples.
>
> (I had to include my UTF8 string splitting code in order to handle
> CJK characters properly, so you will need to scroll down a bit to
> get to the markup command itself.)

Veeery nice!  Please submit this to the LSR.


    Werner

[Andrew Bernard]

Does that idea gazump my offer to put it in OLL? I'd really like to
see it there.

If people have usability issues with OLL, what are they? Let me know
and I will work to address that. It's already easy to use in my view
(but that's just me).


Andrew

On Wed, 30 Sep 2020 at 15:43, Werner LEMBERG <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
> Veeery nice!  Please submit this to the LSR.
>
>
>     Werner

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Does that idea gazump my offer to put it in OLL?  I'd really like to
> see it there.

LSR and OLL are certainly not exclusive :-) I know that your code fits
well to the former, but I have no idea about the latter.


    Werner

[Adam M. Griggs]

Hi Werner, Andrew, Aaron,

Yes, my intended use case is indeed lyrics, editorial footers and
informational taglines. In the case of the attached .png, I'm using it
to indicate which kana get stressed and, by omission, which kana to
glide over. Pardon my poor editorial judgement: this is a WIP.

Quickly checking just now indicates that emphasis points came into use
in Japanese texts during the Meiji era.

Aaron's solution works for me, so I'm rolling with that. Thank you all
for your replies.

I'm having some issues with tied lyrics when there is \markup
involved—\undertie might prove helpful—but that's a topic for another
thread.


On 29/9/20 3:51 pm, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

>> Yes, but I can exactly see that one of the few places
>> Japanese/Chinese emphasis dots may be used is in lyrics, which I
>> guess is the OP's intent.
> Also having a (minor) Sinology background, I've never seen emphasis
> dots in scores from Taiwan, including music using the jiǎnpǔ notation.
> I guess we have to wait for more details before discussing this
> further...
>
>
>      Werner