Skip to main content ↑ ↓
Topic: When is NWC going to support Unicode? (Read 17467 times) previous topic - next topic

When is NWC going to support Unicode?

When is NWC going to support Unicode? Windows has been supporting it for years! I am trying to write Slovak songs (Windows XP) and cannot because NWC displays some Slovak diacritics correctly, while converting others to something entirely different.

The default font (Times) has a full, support for all of Central European characters (not just Slovak), my keyboard lets me enter Slovak characters, but NWC treats it as the so called "Western" set (hey, Slovakia is a Western society!).

When trying to set the font to use a different character mapping, it only offers "Western" and "Hebrew". What the?

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #1 –
Are you sure it only supports Western and Hebrew? Try that again, but this time ensure that the little font window scolls down.

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #2 –
Yes, I'm sure.

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #3 –
Oh my goodness. Now that I took another look at it, I finally noticed that it is scrollable. Thanks very much! I have found the Central-European thingie and can write my lyrics in Slovak.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. :)

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #4 –
Yes, there is no problem with Slovak; I use it from time to time. But NWC still needs to support Unicode. Recently I had to set a text in Greek and put a Latin transliteration underneath it. I could do it, but only in monotonic orthography. I wanted polytonic, but had to settle for monotonic. I have several fonts with all the necessary letters, but NWC won't display them; it's enough of a job getting both Greek and Latin alphabets into the same lyrics, and polytonic it just won't do.

In any case, Unicode is the only solution in site to the current encoding mess, and the sooner everyone adopts it the better.

Stephen

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #5 –
It's an old wish list item that we should be able to specify differing fonts for lyric lines, at least on a per stave basis.

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #6 –
Hi!

How could you set two lyric lines with different alphabets?

I've just tried with a Russian song and its pronunciation underneath, but everything I managed to obtain was a sequence of question marks "??????????" instead of the cyrillic letters! [I actually copied each letter from the Windows Fonts Map (or whatever it is called in English...) into the Lyrics editor...]

Please try to explain to me what might have gone wrong...

Moreover: why shouldn't we be able to use different FONTS (or encodings...) on the same lyric line or in the same Text Insertion box in the future?

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #7 –
NWC is an elegantly simple program.  There are a lot of things we all want from time to time, but I'm always mindful of what we paid to buy NWC and how little time it takes to download and install it.  I think it was about 10 seconds earlier today.

The more we add, the more complicated the program will become.  The more complicated it is, the more expensive it will be in terms of disk space, support, and difficulty in learning the product.

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #8 –
I didn't read the whole thread but the subject is of my interest. I need to write Hindi lyrics and NWC doesn't support it. i will test to write few Hindi characters to check whether this forum suports unicode!
मेरा नाम रजनीश मंगला है

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #9 –
It should work if you have the Hindi characters in a font that can be installed as a user font.  It's just a matter of finding that font.  So the keyboard letter A gives you such-and-such a symbol, a gives you another, etc.

That's how the various fonts such as Boxmark2 and NWC2STD work, with music symbols in place of letters.

Anyone you send the file to will also have to have the same user font installed in order to view and print the song.
 

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #10 –
I translate... "My name is Rajneesh Mangala".
So yes, unicode works on the forum.
I wonder how hard it would be to put unicode into NWC?
NWC would need some sort of backwards compatibility with the old ones to support the old code pages.

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #11 –
hello david, (sorry for using small letters), using fonts is a cumbersome process because you have to know the keyboard layout of that fonts. and there are hundreds of different fonts exiting that use different schemes.
see my online font converter (to unicode)
http://rajneesh.mobstop.com/unicode.php

and font to picture application:
http://rajneesh.mobstop.com/font.php

Andrew
using unicode in browser (forum / website / blog) is much easier than using it in standalone applications. i think it deters most programmers. unicode characters are 16 bit characters as compared to ASCII (8 bit). the cursor appears to be much farther than where it really is. but still the effort to make NWC unicode will bring its fruits. it will help their market widen up.

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #12 –
First, I don't read any of the alphabets/syllabarys on the two web-sites linked to in the last post, but I have a question about them.  When I look at them I see a large number of dotted (or dashed) circles with what look like diacritical marks over them.  Is this what the pages should look like, or do I have something misinstalled (or just plain missing) on my machine?

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #13 –
 
AFAIK Unicode doesn't work directly on NWC lyrics. That's -beside other things- why I don't generally use NWC output as a final product, but convert per page basis to EMF and do the rest of the editing in OpenOffice Drawing.

سلام ايله (with greetings/peace)
 

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #14 –
NWC2 Beta 2.14 includes some changes that should make lyrics work better when your current code page supports multiple byte character sets.

Beta 2.14 is available now.

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #15 –
What does "multiple-byte characters" mean ?  I need to input these characters into my lyrics: ĦħĠġŻżĊċ.  These can be found in standard font-sets like New-Times Roman, Arial, Comic-Sans and others.  How can one use them in NWC ?  Cut-and-past from Word does not work: I tried that.  While the "paste" looks OK when these characters are pasted intio the lyrics box, closing the Lyrics box turns the characters back into the standard non-dotted characters.  Grrrr ... so close and yet so far away...

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #16 –
The changes of Beta 2.14 are not Unicode based. The changes allow you to use all of the characters supported in your code page, without conflicting with the lyric syllable parser.

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #17 –
For those who don't know what a code page is, this article might help a bit (although it reads a little "techie")   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page.  This page gives more information http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode/codepages.html  I haven't explored these sites, but they may be of interest to some.

Eric, are you saying that all a person needs to do is instal a Unicode code page for NWC2 to recognize/support it?



David

Re: When is NWC going to support Unicode?

Reply #18 –
For Windows 95, 98, or ME, you must be using what is typically referred to as an international (DBCS) build of Windows. For Windows XP, you control this from the Regional and Language Options of the Control Panel. In your Wikipedia reference, we are dealing with Windows (ANSI) code pages.