It is pretty a shame to know that most Chinese folk instrument players in Mainland China cannot read five-line staves (as they only can read Jianpu), while most of those who live outside of Mainland China can read them and do read them in most times.
However, I have a little feeling that this may be a big bang chance to boost up the sale of Dorico in Mainland China market.
I am not pushing anything, just have curiosity about Jianpu on the roadmap of Dorico development.
Will it be available in approximately Dorico Pro 4? or 5? or not decided yet? or too confidential to talk about?
P.S.: Jianpu was initially from France, then spread to Japan, then Mainland China. Some Mainland Chinese musicians (AFAIK, mostly teachers and professors among conservatories there) think that Jianpu “is a Chinese thing and shall be preferred comparing to Western 5-line staves,” and I don’t give this political correctness my four asterisks.
P.P.S.: According to my observation, Sibelius is famous in this market due to: 1) having cracked versions; 2) easier to learn than Finale; 3) having Jianpu add-ons purchasable from 3rd-party vendors (while Finale doesn’t have one). I don’t think software piracy is good, but I do believe that Dorico will provide better Jianpu engraving experience than any competitive product in this market.
But please let us know that you will have this feature planned. Or at least open up a plug-in interface for some developers.
I’ve waiting the Jianpu support from the v1 till now. So far feeling very disappointed every time a new version came without it.
With this feature, it will really open-up the willingness for many Asian users to go with Dorico.
Do you have any updates on the effort to add Jianpu support to Dorico? I too am eager to have this feature, and I agree with Roger Huang’s assessment on the market demand for such a capability.
I’ve noticed it too, and I’m really hopeful that Dorico will include Jianpu notation support in the near future. For my purposes, an extensive, intricate support system isn’t necessary, as Jianpu isn’t typically used for notating complex scores. It would, however, be useful to have a supplementary Jianpu melody line above the staff. This would be a significant aid, for example, for the members of our local church choir, facilitating faster melody acquisition and allowing the congregation to sing along with greater ease. The majority of them are not proficient at sight-reading traditional five-line scores.
At present, the workaround solutions are suboptimal, such as using special fonts in lieu of lyrics. I’m exploring the creation of a custom font for personal use as well. However, the issue I’ve come across is that lyric syllables cannot be anchored to a barline, leading to alignment issues with the notes that are not very convenient.
The demand for this feature is particularly strong in the Asian market, and I’m confident the Dorico team is aware of it. I also trust that when the Dorico team undertakes this task, the results will be impressive. In the meantime, any improvements to lyric handling, or any other potential workaround, would be immensely beneficial.
I’m not Chinese or was trained in Jianpu but after learning about this method lately - I’m very intrigued. As someone who is trained in moveable-Do solfege sight-singing this system made a lot of sense and was really easy for me to pick up. I feel like if this was more supported in modern, industry leading softwares it might get more popularity outside of the Asian market.
One possible issue is the way, in the first measure in the example above, The Jianpu dot comes between the dotted quarter note and the eighth note with nothing in the staff to attach to? It’s like it needs the dotted quarter to actually be a quarter tied to an eighth, though hidden I’m sure.
I’m barely a user of it. but I’ve found very simple things quick to sketch on plain paper or using this one phone app that’s out there. But I hate ascii representations of it. If you come up with a great font…
Not a big fan of the text work-arounds stolen from abc notation for things like octaves, but I’m guessing we’d have to use them where 1’’ gets translated into two dots above a 1.
It’s just not as nice to write/ input on a western keyboard versus pen or pencil. Maybe a scanning app someday …
One down then… what about multiple characters translating to one symbol as I mentioned for octaves - is there a way to do that? Or maybe some strategic shift/ meta key combinations? It would be cool @dan_kreider
I would probably use some ligatures typed as:
1
._
_2
3
…where the lines would overlap. If they aren’t long enough, the user could type a double underscore. Starting with an underscore would place the line to the left, and right-align it to the character.
Below is an example of our current hymnal version that has been used for more than 10 years. It was engraved by Encore previously. Now as I discussed with you I am working on a new revised version, but I cannot find a good solution to implement Jianpu like it was. Although temporarily the committee agreed to remove Jianpu because there is not good way to implement in modern professional notation software for the moment. But it is still something that many people want to keep. (Although it made the hymn look noisy, but…) 20 - 尊主為王.pdf (74.4 KB)
I tried a few Jianpu fonts I can find over the internet, but the challenge of using it as lyrics in Dorico, is the slurs and barlines. The barline glyph cannot be aligned easily with the barlines on the score without manually adding spaces, and the slurs have to be added by using illustrator-like apps. Other than our hymnal project, there are also some new hymnal planned for youth and children that also require Jianpu above the staff, which is quite challenging and time-consuming for me.
This made me think of your musAnalysis opentype font, that you can draw curves(as slurs), and have more complex combination. I am totally new to fonts and know almost nothing about OpenType font features. I downloaded your musAnalysis project file in the forum and bought the FontCreator Pro. Just about the spend some time learning it. Not sure if I can make it, but it would be great if you and other members in this forum have interest on how this can be created. I would be very grateful!
