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On holiday in Ivailovgrad in far south east Bulgaria next to the Turkish & Greek borders: lovely weather, lovely hill-walking: hotel has hot and cold running cockroaches.

Progging will/may restart on Mittwoch.

Enjoy your holiday Richmond, sounds lovely. Apart from the bugs
I'm currently trying to work on the engine (also squashing bugs!)

If it's any consolation, cockroaches can't stand people... yeah, probably not much of a consolation. I remember someone saying they turned on the light in their hotel room once and for a split second the floor was black... then the carpet was revealed shortly afterwards.

Cockroaches are not bugs (Hemipterans) they are Blattodeans.

Having coped with large, flying ones in Saudi and the UAE, these ones were not really a big thing: just a source of humour for my wife and I.

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Getting 'somewhere'.

Of course those 'buttons' are half-dead as the cardScript has yet to be edited to take them into account.

So: the rawKey codes have been modified in the cardScript:
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Notice how the conditional statement now depend on the VISIBILITY of the button groups, and NOT the VISIBILITY of the control buttons.

The Conjunct syllabic codes for these characters still have to be implemented.
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So: Here we go:
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Anyone who wibbles on about 'the romance of programming' ought to be forced to write 5,000 line SWITCH statements for a few years.

Looking good:
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Here's the stack (still numbered 1.0):

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Before any standalone builds there needs to be code to show Labio-Velar syllabics here.

Well: there's spot of morning work done:
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Personally I think that this implementation is important so that someone typing in a text can check the form of a syllabic character BEFORE inserting it.

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https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/rfvfvxja ... 9nyw4&dl=0

Quite apart from a more robust help system, I obviously need to implement tone mark insertion:
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And diacritics:
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Buttons for Ge'ez Tone marks:
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While that text in the previous posting only mentions 2 diacritics used in Ethiopic texts that is inaccurate:
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This makes me feel uncomfortable:
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U+12D0 & U+030E

especially when the Unicode convention provides this:
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U+12D0 & U+135F
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So: I'm dumping the first one, and going for these 3:
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Getting somewhere:
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Rejigged the main instruction page:
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Poking around a bit:
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It should be obvious that to PROPERLY to mark Ethiopian hymns with Yared notation, as well as the 'standard' tone marks:
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There is a need to input a fairly wide range of superscripted symbols.

This is not, currently possible adhering to the Unicode 16 convention and standard Unicode complaint fonts such as the

AbyssinicaSIL-Regular.ttf

I have been using with Sheba:Makeda.

The simplest way to get this sort of text input is to 'hack' AbyssinicaSIL-Regular.ttf (and as it is Open Source that does not fuss me), and put
the superscript glyphs necessary into one of the Private Use Areas.

However the range of symbols in that image above seems larger than this simple table:
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We can also have a lot of fun with Zaima:
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http://yacob.org/ethio-ruby/
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You have to start feeling extremely excited when you see that superscripted glyphs can be stacked up to 4 levels.
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Obviously whichever scribe who wrote that saw me coming.
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If someone (anyone?) can let me know the difference between an 'informative' and a 'normative' reference I would be extremely grateful.

"Zaima", short for "YeKidus Yared YeZaima Miliktoch" (cannonically «የቅዱስ ያሬድ የዜማ ምልክቶች» [Q1]), is an advanced, non-neumic, ekphonetic notation convention used in Ge'ez liturgical literature.

Yo!

non-neumic

Wow! this appears to be an 'English' word invented by an Ethiopian, as a quick web-search should make clear.

ekphonetic

"Ekphonetic notation consists of symbols added to certain sacred texts, especially lectionary readings of Biblical texts, as a mnemonic device to assist in their cantillation. Ekphonetic notation can take a number of forms, and has been used in several Jewish and Christian plainchant traditions, but is most commonly associated with Byzantine chant."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekphonetic_notation

"Ekphonetic notation ceased to be used about the fourteenth century.[1] In many cases, the original meaning of ekphonetic neumes is obscure, and must be reconstructed by comparison with later notation." (my emphasis)

So that is where 'non-neumic' is derived from.

So 'non-neumic' is just a way for an Ethiopian religieux to demonstrate that he doesn't want Ethiopic/Ge'ez cantillion marks to be associated with the 'naughty' Roman and Greek churches.

Version 1.2 is available here:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/rfvfvxja ... c75ur&dl=0