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You might have missed the fact, but internet globalization has changed the world behind the scenes...

utf8-0.jpg

Around 2000 most of the documents were either plain 7-bit-ASCII (chars 0-127: A-Za-z0-9~!@#$%^&*()_+`-=[]{}\|;:'",.<>?/) perhaps using a few text-encoded characters like the euro sign or so, or using some codepage using 8-bit ASCII (0-255) allowing for a few diacritics like é â ü ß.

Those parts of the world which do not use the latin alphabet but Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Japanese to name a few used to have another 'code page'. Most of the time such text was not readable on a 'normal' computer using the default code page.

 

Luckily there was already some standard that allows almost any character from any alphabet: unicode. Unfortunately, this 16-bit Unicode isn't compatible with 8-bit ascii. Enter utf8, a standard that allows all unicode characters, keeping all existing plain ASCII-documents around the world intact.

 

MusiCAD 4 allows all utf8 symbols to be used in dialogs allowing cut and paste from other sources.

utf8-1.jpg 

 

To simplify entering text with diacritics you may use backslash-key-sequences. Backslash sequences will be converted to utf8 when saved.

'

aigu/acute

\'a

á

`

grave

\`a

à

:

trema/diëresis/umlaut

\:a

ä

^

circonflex

\^a

â

-

macron/bar

\-d

ð

o

ring

\oa

å

,

cedille

\,c

ç

u

breve

\ua

diakritsche_tekens.jpg

v

hacek/caron

\vs

š

/

slash

\/o

ø

E

ligatuur

\EA

Æ

 

Below you'll find a list of common diacritics and their entry.

diakriet.jpg

 

To enter Greek or Cyrillic you need to instruct Windows to switch to an alternative keyboard layout which will map your keyboard to a Greek of Cyrillic alphabet. Do not forget to switch it back to US when editing music...

 

When saving files, MusiCAD will convert 8-bit ut8-codes to decimal values like: \208\152

utf8 / unicode / diacritics
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