Scale name indexes, much progress! (Patreon)

Making the index pages for the scale names has been more of a challenge than I anticipated... but it was all worth the effort. Now I have a script that pulls scale names from the database, and creates something almost acceptable as a PDF. The painful part was paginating and collating a flow in three columns, in a way that supported long scale names that may wrap onto two lines, with vertical space optimized, so names that wrap don't get broken up onto two columns or across two pages. When you see it, it's easy to appreciate and describe, but the programming needed to make that happen is convoluted. And I did it from scratch. Those are "artisanal" columns.

I also decided to omit all the pitch class set names by Justin Pecot and William Zeitler. That reduced the total page count from 64 to only 43.

Like I said, it's "almost" acceptable... I still have issues with the rendering of that uppercase delta character Δ, (see page 8). I can dedupe some of the alternate spellings of Rāga, for example "Rāga Madhakauns" and "Rāga Madhukauns" (see page 14). Which one is correct? I don't know that there actually is a correct spelling of a romanization, but I'll consult with some bilingual musicians to sort that out. Likewise names like "Bhairubahar Thaat" and "Bhairubahar That" (see page 20) need to be deduped. There are also names literally indexed like "Rāga Sankara (shankara)" (see page 15) with an alternate spelling in parentheses. That's sloppy.

If anyone here is an expert in those musical traditions and could point me toward good resources, I'll be very appreciative. I don't want to publish a book with a lot of misspelled non-english words. Other authors have done that. I want to do better.

My scale database has scales in other alphabets, e.g. names of Rāga in Sanskrit. I have omitted those, along with names in Arabic as well. Why? It's an English language book, and while I like their inclusion on the website I've already had enough headaches with fonts. One has to draw the line somewhere.

I am also considering removing all the "compound chord" names, e.g. those you see on page 16. I'm not convinced that it's necessary to include them in an index.

I am not removing legit duplicate names. They are just an unfortunate reality, like "Hypolydian" (page 24) that could be either scale 2773 or 2741.

The amount of proofreading required to get this comfortably ready for publication and confidently up to a good standard of accuracy will be enormous... but that's what this project is all about and why it matters to do it well.

I hope you are all enjoying the change of season and, for some, the return to school.
Cheers
Ian