> . . . If you don't mind, can I ask what code or language is this > workaround based on? (Like why does one need to input two pairs of > number combinations to obtain a symbol)
This is based on Unicode, but that doesn't really answer your question, as Unicode is nothing but a catalogue of thousands of symbols, with each symbol assigned a "Unicode number", which is just the catalogue-number of the symbol. Starting from a symbol's Unicode number, one can use an "encoding algorithm" to produce a sequence of bytes that represents the symbol in a real text file. The problem is that, historically, there have been invented several *different* encoding algorithms, and you have to know which encoding algorithm you are using. The two currently dominant encoding algorithms are called UTF-16 and UTF-8. Lilypond uses UTF-8. (To some extent, Microsoft products use "Unicode", but they use UTF-16. At least that is the case in the old Microsoft software I use, but my guess is that Microsoft will stick with UTF-16, because if it switched to UTF-8, then that would invalidate a huge existing repository of Visual Basic programs.) A UTF-8 character takes up either 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 bytes. That fact alone will tell you that understanding UTF-8 is not easy. If you really want to know the story, I recommend the following two Web sites for starters: http://www.tenminutetutor.com On this site, the "Articles" box on the left of the page contains 9 links. Click on and read the following 3: Unicode UTF-8 UTF-16 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 This gives more information on UTF-8 and also presents an illuminating comparison of UTF-8 to UTF-16. -- Tom _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
