Many music notation publication sites provide notation in the form of Microsoft Word “doc” or “docx” files. There are many reasons to avoid using MSWord for notation of Indian classical music. I will try to list down a few here and while on the topic argue why the approach taken by Patantara is much more enduring.

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Patantara had thus far used Mozilla Persona for signing in users for editing documents. Since Mozilla retired the Persona service this month, a new email-based signin mechanism is now in place. Our hope is that this will be easier to use for our less technically inclined users.

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The Patantara notation viewer used to use combining unicode characters to display sthayi - i.e. octave - markers. These appear as either single dot above or below a svara letter or a double dot above or below. The single dot indicates one octave shift and the double dot indicates two octave shift. These markers displayed correctly only in Safari on MacOSX and failed on the more commonly used Chrome browser due to a series of bugs in Chrome. We’ve now “fixed” these by rendering the dots separately and not relying on the browser’s ability to handle unicode combining characters correctly.

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Patantara has supported automatic transliteration to multiple Indic scripts from a single roman starting point. This is not always ideal as there is often a need to bring in lyric text in the native script, perhaps when copy-pasting from another source. Now, Patantara can help you with this situation by automatically detecting the script and morphing it into the target script. For an example, see Medha Suktam In that example, text to be transliterated is presented directly in devanagari instead of first expressing it in roman diacritics. Read More ...

It looks like Patantara’s text editor has not recently been usable for typing roman letters with diacritic marks. If you type “a” and marked with a combining accent character, the editor would pretend that it needed two spaces to represent that and would jump two spaces around the accented “a”. I did a long due upgrade to CodeMirror - from v3.20 to v5.1 - which solved this issue on the site. Read More ...

Added notation for Syama Sastri’s svarajati “Amba Kamaksi”. Not all sections are complete, but the notation part is.

The site has received some minor tweaks regarding presentation of text. For example, you can now mark regions of text to be transliterated using conventional Markdown link notation with the link #lyrics and these regions will change when you change the lyrics text script at the top of a notation page. More importantly, we’re working to bring online Dr. Sripada Pinakapani’s meticulous compilation of 160 and then some pallavis previously published in book form as “Pallavi Gāna Sudhā”. Read More ...

Until today, creating/editing/publishing notations was limited to a few invited people. From today on, anyone who wants to create notation that can be viewed automatically in five south Indian language scripts, or as staff notation is welcome to use Patantara to do it. You don’t even have to create an account on patantara.com. Just sign in using Mozilla Persona using one of your existing accounts such as Gmail or Yahoo! mail.

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Added notation of Saveri varnam to patantara. Mrs. Sudha Harikrishnan kindly provided the descriptive notation for this beautiful varnam.

A note on “prescriptive” and “descriptive” notation -

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Just landed a few changes on Patantara - The names (URLs) of documents and attachments are now much shorter and much less intimidating. Some UI tweaks in the editor to help with the process of adding attachments. When you now drag-drop a file, the label of the reference created will be automatically selected so that you can change it immediately to something that is more meaningful in the context of the document. Read More ...