Re: UTF-8 support needs implementing to fix all bidi/rtl/ltr issues

[Patrick McCarty]

On 2009-12-13, Ted Walther wrote:
> 
> With the new fix, can I just wrap a stanza in U+202A .. U+202C to get
> the desired effect?  At some point, when RTL is implemented for the
> musical notes, I may want to let the Hebrew do the natural thing, and
> put in some U+202B..U+202C to make the English text stay in sync with
> it.

As far as I can see, you would need to wrap every individual
*syllable* with the bidi characters.  This is needed because each
syllable is parsed as a separate piece of string markup, so there is
no underlying connection between syllables, words, and stanzas as a
whole (as far as I know) in a lyrics setting.

It would be nice, in the future, to recognize paragraphs as
paragraphs, stanzas and stanzas, etc. so that you can just use a
single directional override for an entire section of text.  But I
imagine this would require many changes to LilyPond's parser and
mechanism for handling text.

Depending on what you are doing, you might consider using
U+202D...U+202C and U+202E...U+202C instead, since these combinations
override all strong characters too.

RTL music is an interesting idea.  Would you like us to add an
enhancement request to the bug tracker?

Thanks,
Patrick