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Author Topic: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet  (Read 9641 times)

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Chris Ryall

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Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« on: July 12, 2013, 05:15:38 PM »

So ideally it would need an F/B♭ box to do the tune in G minor as required by DS. Or a C/F if it's got a low E♭... [ goes off to experiment ]

See above. I guess Anahata might be pasting in off a text file as I do, though he's well clever enough to reprogam a keyboard! Now that UTF8 is ubiqitous (and I see we have a content="charset=UTF-8" meta in there too) is it time we encouraged real music symbols rather than fake them with #/b?

I'm thinking as a perhaps something attached to one of our edit buttons eg :|glug inserts the text string ":!glug" so it "should" be easy to make controls entering ♯ or ♭ ?  My experimental chords page automatically translates eg Ab as you leave the edit box .. but then no one will ever type "Absinthe" into a melodeon layout, will they? :P

Before we even consider - it might be helpful if anyone who sees >> ♯/♭ << as eg squares rather than musical symbols might say so here (and also if that persists after updating their probably ten year old browser)  >:E
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malcolmbebb

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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #1 on: July 12, 2013, 05:36:47 PM »

Quite like the idea of having them as an edit button, although I not purist enough to be fussy.
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Lester

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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #2 on: July 12, 2013, 05:58:52 PM »

Whats wrong with # and b - everyone knows what they mean and you can type them easily from the keyboard/touch screen of the IT device of your choice.

rees

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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #3 on: July 12, 2013, 06:50:21 PM »

Whats wrong with # and b - everyone knows what they mean and you can type them easily from the keyboard/touch screen of the IT device of your choice.

What he said.
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deltasalmon

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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #4 on: July 12, 2013, 06:56:21 PM »

Whats wrong with # and b - everyone knows what they mean and you can type them easily from the keyboard/touch screen of the IT device of your choice.

What he said.

Thirded.

Although I have tried finding keyboard shortcuts,

When I

1.) hold down the alt key
2.) press the + key
3.) press the keys for 266D, 266E, or 266F
4.) release the alt key

Then it outputs ♭♮♯ respectively.

The problem is when I do this in a word processor it works fine but when I do this in my internet browser (I tried chrome and IE) then it puts the symbol in my address bar or opens a menu. So you'd still have to end up copying and pasting it from another window into the web-browser.

(also the above keycodes only worked when I set a parameter in the regedit which I don't suggest doing if you've never edited your registry before)
« Last Edit: July 12, 2013, 07:42:01 PM by deltasalmon »
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Anahata

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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #5 on: July 12, 2013, 08:01:26 PM »

Apart from not working reliably, the problem with alt + some obscure number is remembering the numbers. I use a character map application to get them, but Chris's idea of buttons alongside the smilies is an excellent one.
We are lucky that these codes work on melnet, which they do because it has an explicit declaration of utf-8 encoding in the header of every page.
Perhaps we can have Euro and a few other sensible symbols on buttons too.
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deltasalmon

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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #6 on: July 12, 2013, 08:08:50 PM »

Apart from not working reliably, the problem with alt + some obscure number is remembering the numbers. I use a character map application to get them, but Chris's idea of buttons alongside the smilies is an excellent one.
We are lucky that these codes work on melnet, which they do because it has an explicit declaration of utf-8 encoding in the header of every page.
Perhaps we can have Euro and a few other sensible symbols on buttons too.

If it's a character I use a lot I don't mind having to memorize a number (I have all the áéíóú memorized for typing in other languages), character map is nice and has a ton of characters but it slows down the typing flow when you have to copy and paste between different windows.

I still think that the # b and EUR work just fine but this SMF mod might do what you guys are talking about.

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=3054
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Anahata

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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #7 on: July 12, 2013, 08:55:06 PM »

this SMF mod might do what you guys are talking about.

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=3054

Looks perfect. As it's (presumably - I haven't checked) all in PHP it should be easily customisable.

I see that by default it has buttons for fractions, which would come in useful on melnet too, when talking about 2½ rows without resorting to decimals. In fact a button for "2½" wouldn't do any harm...

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Chris Brimley

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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #8 on: July 12, 2013, 09:05:14 PM »

There's many other international characters that are not easy to insert here - accents and cedillas, for example, and for what is surely an international forum, isn't this a bit inconsistent?  I would support the idea of having a wider character set available, if that's feasible.
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Chris Ryall

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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #9 on: July 12, 2013, 10:14:56 PM »

OMG! What have I started?

As an eclectic melodeonista I try to use "proper" language terms when I post about non British music, but where do you stop? Once upon a time I learned a few of the 4 digit codes for eg €, but frankly life is a bit short for such matters. For present I keep a block of äèîœü etc text in my diary (why not) and paste across.

We need a sense or proportion, and practicality in this. I personally use. €, ♯, ♭, and ½ quite lot. French acute accented vowels  are easy on all platforms and the others ain't too common. Actually this new tablet offers me most accents at the cost of holding down a key .…

Others will differ and there is noT space for every variant. I'd offer the set above as universally useful. I'd add ♮; we are a musical forum.

I don't accept the "no change needed" voices on this thread. Had we followed such wisdom there would have been no Melnet, maybe no Internet? This technology is now mature and I'd suggest we take advantage of it. But in a way advantageous to the forum.
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Etienne

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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #10 on: July 12, 2013, 10:48:36 PM »

Being french, I'm certainly irritated when an accent is missing or when the wrong accent is used, but when I'm on a french forum !
I totally understand that people may not have them on a forum like melnet, where the common language is english and where people come from everywhere on the planet, so I do not lend any attention about it. (And I can't blame anyone here for one or two missing accents on the tittle of a french tune when I massacre english language in all my posts).

About ♯ and ♭ , I find them greatly estethic, but as the melodeon is not a true musical instrument why should we used proper musicals symbols ? I think i will use them (if they are added).
« Last Edit: July 12, 2013, 10:52:35 PM by Etienne »
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Chris Ryall

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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #11 on: July 13, 2013, 01:16:18 AM »


Cool summary. Think on it. Do we play a real musical instrument, or not?  :o
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Stiamh

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I must say I like the look of the proper sharps and flats, but using them would bring one fairly major drawback from my point of view: searching for them would be problematic. Searching the forum for "C#/D" or "B/C/C#" (or "C#"D/G", Chris) will give accurate results because that is all practically everyone has been using up until now. Searching for "C♯/D" would not - quite apart from the fact that we won't have buttons to insert the correct symbols into our search engine.

(BTW I long ago stopped using the forum's search facility. As I pointed out once a while ago, you'll get results 1000x better if you type "site:melodeon.net <search terms>" into Google.)

BTW Etienne, where I live your spelling of your own name would be considered as missing an accent. Isn't it time, in the computer age, that the French starting putting accents on capital letters? As we do here in QUÉBEC  (:)

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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #13 on: July 13, 2013, 08:43:16 AM »

There's many other international characters that are not easy to insert here - accents and cedillas, for example, and for what is surely an international forum, isn't this a bit inconsistent?  I would support the idea of having a wider character set available, if that's feasible.

Perhaps the message editor should have a button that pops up a small window full of the most-(locally) used non-ASCII characters. Two clicks is simple enough to use: one to open the window, one to insert a character and close the window.

A handful of support requests would soon have the list edited to a useful subset, but you'd get a long way with U+00A0 to U+00FF (a.k.a. the Latin-1 or ISO/IEC 8859-1 set which covers most West European languages), ♭ ♮ ♯ obviously, € because it's not in Latin-1, Ŵ and ŵ because they are also missing from Latin-1 but occur in Welsh, and no doubt a few things I've forgotten.

(Latin-1 includes ¼ ½ ¾ and ©)

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Chris Ryall

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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #14 on: July 13, 2013, 09:17:20 AM »

Steve, The Québec accent is célèbre in Metropolitan France  ;)  and yes the SMF search engine is a bit champêtre.  I also hate the way it times you out when you change terms and try again.                     

So searching may indeed be an issue. I just did a mini test on google and a quote wrapped "c♯/d" seemed to find stuff, and highlighted >> C#D 21 buttons <<. Seems the slash is ignored even when in quotes and that #/♯ may be aliased.

That does not apply to "b" wrt the bèmol ;) in E♭ - "♭èmol" also fails (not unexpectedly)!

My Bridge site has a built in google box that searches just the site; been aw hile but I just tested, still works fine, and was free. Course you lose ability to search by posting ID

See Anahata has posted as I type ;D now, why would he want a Welsh character?  >:E
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Etienne

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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #15 on: July 13, 2013, 09:42:00 AM »

BTW Etienne, where I live your spelling of your own name would be considered as missing an accent. Isn't it time, in the computer age, that the French starting putting accents on capital letters? As we do here in QUÉBEC  (:)
Typographic rules used by "L'imprimerie Nationale" (you know how we love our old institutions) preconize the use of accents on capital letters only when all the word is written that way, so Etienne and ÉTIENNE are ok, but Étienne and ETIENNE are wrong, subtil isn't it ? By the way, these rules are not written in marble and are just guidance, and there is a passionate debate about that point since the apparition of computers in the graphic profession 30 years ago (no consensus at this date...). As I have learn classical typography during my studies, I will certainly continue to apply these rules until I die... (oh no, everybody will know I'm a traditionnalist now  ::))

My appologies for the drift.
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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #16 on: July 13, 2013, 10:06:39 AM »

And sorry for the quite pedant post, hey, I'm french  >:E
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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #17 on: July 13, 2013, 10:23:01 AM »


[/quote]
 By the way, these rules are not written in marble
[/quote]
Maybe that's a definable difference between the French and English: our rules are written in sandstone, so every few decades they erode to leave a clean 'slate' - if I'm not mixing my metamorphics. Presumably Scottish rules are written in granite and never change.
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Chris Ryall

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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #18 on: July 13, 2013, 10:29:28 AM »

Presumably Scottish rules are written in granite and never change.

Scottish rules are written in Edinburgh - and that last changed in 1999  ;D

 Google google .. it appears we'll also need à, á, è, é, ì, ò, ó and ù  ::)
  (A few more changes up there, Gaelic script might also accrete "€") ;)
« Last Edit: July 13, 2013, 10:40:02 AM by Chris Ryall »
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Re: Using "true" ♯/♭ characters on melnet
« Reply #19 on: July 13, 2013, 11:08:32 AM »

Scottish rules are written in schist and gneiss. Metamorphic rocks are changed by extreme heat and pressure.
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