Re: Chinese punctuation in Lyric mode

[Christopher R. Maden]

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On 03/04/2013 06:53 PM, Silas S. Brown wrote:
> Hi Werner, here is a minimal test case:
> 
> \new Voice { c' c' c' c' } \addlyrics { 啊, 啊, 啊, 啊 } \addlyrics {
> 啊， 啊， 啊， 啊 } \addlyrics { 啊、 啊、 啊、 啊 }
> 
> (The Chinese character 啊 is like "ah".)  In the first verse,
> normal commas are used.  The second uses full-width commas, and the
> 3rd uses dunhao.  The ONLY verse to be aligned correctly is that
> with normal commas (I was mistaken when I said full-width commas
> work as well).
> 
> I've attached the output PDF.  I hope it's possible to make the 
> horizontal alignment of verses 2 and 3 to be the same as that of 
> verse 1, i.e. treat ， and 、 the same as normal commas.

This seems to be a side-effect of the font in use, and also some
differences between Asian and European typesetting traditions.

If you highlight the characters in the lyrics in the PDF one at a
time, you can see that in this font, the full-width comma has a mark
in the middle of its character space, causing what looks like
unnecessary space between the 啊 and the comma.  However, the
typesetting routines have no idea (I presume) where the black stuff in
a character is, and just put the characters next to each other as best
as possible.

With both the full-width comma and the dunhao, there is a lot of white
to the right of the black stuff as well.  The lyrics are laid out so
that the actual width of the syllable is centered on the note; the
problem is that the *visible* width (i.e., the black stuff) is not the
same as the actual width.

In Chinese typesetting, every character[*] is expected to fill a
square in a grid.  Aligning these flexibly in the same way as European
characters is going to produce some odd results... unfortunately, I
don’t know enough about Chinese musical traditions to suggest anything
better, but this is the best you are going to get without a bunch of
manual overrides or custom fonts.

~Chris

[*] With exceptions for half-width characters, which are paired to
make full-width character cells.
- -- 
Chris Maden, text nerd  <URL: http://crism.maden.org/ >
  FIVE TONS OF FLAX
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