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Topic: entering Turkish lyrics (Read 4933 times) previous topic - next topic

entering Turkish lyrics

I just started a project for which I will be transcribing a number of Turkish devotional songs (illahileri), and quickly ran into a problem with the lyrics. I realize there was a related thread back in April, but I thought I'd share my solution.

I'm using Arial as the lyric font. For the special Turkish characters, I had to use charmap. However, certain characters won't paste properly into the lyric editor, but instead get turned into ? characters. The ones I've had a problem with so far are: small 'g' with circumflex (0xF0 or 240), small undotted 'i' (0xFD or 253) and small 's' with cedilla (0xFE or 254). (I haven't needed to use the entire alphabet yet, if ever.)

I tried different things, such as changing the font dialog's "Script" setting to Turkish, but nothing I did would convince Noteworthy to allow those particular characters to paste in.

Finally, I ended up opening up the .nwc file in CodeWright (a programmer's editor) in hex mode, which allows editing the contents of a file as a string of hex codes (I had to first figure out that I needed to tell Noteworthy to save the file uncompressed). I found the spots in the file where the lyrics, found the inserted '?' (0x3F) characters, and typed in their correct values.

Once I did that, Noteworthy had no problem displaying the characters properly. What I found most most interesting, though, is that now that I have the right characters in the file, I can cut and paste them with no problem within the lyric editor!

So at least I have a workaround that (at least for me) beats using a font editor, which I don't want to have to find, download, and learn right now. :-)

It seems to be that maybe the problem is that Noteworthy is not really Unicode enabled, or at least some of the components (e.g., the edit control in the lyric editor) are not. I would guess that a hypothetical future version that is fully Unicode-ready might solve all of these problems, but I don't know for sure.

- Dave

Re: entering Turkish lyrics

Reply #1 –
Yes, NWC is not Unicode enabled. The lyric text is single byte coded (ASCII). I am not sure why you had trouble with the edit control for these characters. We'll see if this can be improved.

Re: entering Turkish lyrics

Reply #2 –
Here's something that may be of help -hopefully. (I'm a Turkish NWC user and very oftenly enter Turkish lyrics)

I have uploaded two nwc files in a zip archive into a Temporary Page. One of the files include the special Turkish characters with Western script, the other with script set to Turkish.

Try copying and pasting the characters from those files and make sure you set *your* documents script to Turkish.

Hth

Re: entering Turkish lyrics

Reply #3 –
Thanks, Ertugrul! That's very helpful. I was hoping you might reply on this thread. I'm doing these transcriptions for Latif Bolat, I don't know if you know of him.

I'm now typing the lyrics in MS Word, then pasting them into Noteworthy, but even in this case not all the characters get pasted properly. It seems to me that the edit control is not using the same font setting for lyrics that the main score window uses, and this may be part of the problem.

BTW, I listened to a couple of your pieces in different temperments and enjoyed them. Some day I will have to get a sound card that will allow me to change tunings.

- Dave

Re: entering Turkish lyrics

Reply #4 –
I don't know Mr.Bolat but Andrew Purdam does. [ball passed to Andrew :) ]

You don't need a special soundcard for tunings. Just use the pitch-bend controller.

Glad to have been of help.

CU

Re: entering Turkish lyrics

Reply #5 –
[ball accepted :-) ]

Dave, say hi to Latif from Andrew (percussion and accordion) in Canberra.

Currently playing mainly Macedonian music with Nitya (flute/sax/guitar, also played with Latif in Canberra) and others.

Andrew

Re: entering Turkish lyrics

Reply #6 –
Hi Andrew, I will pass that on to Latif. He will be in my part of the world (northeast US) this fall, and we'll be playing a few concerts together.

- Dave
 

Re: entering Turkish lyrics

Reply #7 –
I think the reason that the cut and pasting worked after you had put the correct characters in because they were there now. For some odd reason, MS Word does not think that the font Script is installed on my computer, but if I copy some text written in Script, it will then behave.