it possible to search a piece of music by melody rather than by title. An actual example can be found in the Chinese New Hymnal. Parson's code on the other hand contains information on rise and fall in pitch only but precise pitches can be decoded from numbered notation. This way, a children's song book can be indexed like this: |1· 1· |1 23· | "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" |1 1 5 5 |6 6 5 – | "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" |1 2 3 1 |1 2 3 1 | "Frère Jacques" A reason for its popularity among Chinese is that jianpu fits in with the Chinese music tradition. It is a natural extension and unification of the gongche notation widely used in ancient China for recording music. Gongche uses a number of characters to indicate the musical notes, and jianpu can be seen as using numbers to replace those characters. The monophonic nature of music in Chinese tradition also contributes to widespread use because so few elements are needed for monophonic music that music can be notated with little more than a typewriter. Compared with the standard notation, the numbered notation is very compact for just the melody line or monophonic parts. It is even possible to transcribe music in between the lines of text. Transcribing harmony can be done by vertically stacking the notes, but this advantage diminishes as the harmony becomes more complex (or polyphonicity increases). The standard notation, with its graphical notation, is better in representing the duration and timing among multiple notes. Examples The two images below illustrate how the same piece of music is written using the standard notation and the numbered notation. Software for printing numbered notation scores A number of Chinese-language Microsoft Windows applications are available for the WYSIWYG editing of scores (optionally with lyrics) in numbered musical notation. Typically these support only the numbered notation, i.e. it is not possible to mix the numbered notation with a Western-style score in the same file. It was possible to add numbered notation to Sibelius scores via a Chinese-language third-party plugin which is no longer distributed. English-language applications for working with numbered-notation scores are relatively rare, but there have been some developments. In 2019 a project was started to create a cross-platform English-Chinese scorewriter that can print jianpu, Western or tablature staves and saves its scores in MusicXML using LGPL components. There