The Gregorio project – GPL tools for typesetting Gregorian chant

I may be one of the few HN users for whom this is an extremely useful resource. I’m an Anglican priest, so I’m often scanning and pasting bits and pieces of chant into our bulletins. This will, I hope, allow me to create much cleaner looking chant texts in the future! Thank you for sharing it!

I'm surprised this targets TeX rather than lilypond, which AFAIK is the gold standard for free (as in beer and speech) music engraving.

I checked, and lilypond also offers features for Gregorian chant notation [1]. Has anyone used both and is able to compare?

[1] https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.25/Documentation/notation/typese...

I am probably one of the few people here that used this ‘in anger’. Around 15 years ago I would typeset orders of service in tex for our college chapel, and enjoyed typesetting the chant - this tool made it really easy and I could produce IMO beautiful documents.

Most of the time people used bitmaps which would be blurred/pixelated or not resize well

If anyone is interested in playing around with this wonderful tool, there's an online editor (edit: no affiliation). [1] It is much more responsive than compiling in TeX.

[1]: https://www.sourceandsummit.com/editor/alpha/

I’m interested in what may exist for Byzantine notation.

Happy to share! There's nothing quite as distracting as a blurry scan of a chant/hymn.

You might be interested in an online editor [1] for small items. (I haven't used it much, but it seems good.)

[1]: https://www.sourceandsummit.com/editor/alpha/

Happy to share! There's nothing quite as distracting as a blurry scan of a chant/hymn.

You might be interested in an online editor [1] for small items. (I haven't used it much, but it seems good.)

[1]: https://www.sourceandsummit.com/editor/alpha/

Most of the time people used bitmaps which would be blurred/pixelated or not resize well

> Around 15 years ago I would typeset orders of service in tex for our college chapel

Your chapel was very fortunate.

I’m interested in what may exist for Byzantine notation.

If anyone is interested in playing around with this wonderful tool, there's an online editor (edit: no affiliation). [1] It is much more responsive than compiling in TeX.

[1]: https://www.sourceandsummit.com/editor/alpha/

I'm surprised this targets TeX rather than lilypond, which AFAIK is the gold standard for free (as in beer and speech) music engraving.

I checked, and lilypond also offers features for Gregorian chant notation [1]. Has anyone used both and is able to compare?

[1] https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.25/Documentation/notation/typese...

Good question, they considered it at some point:

> Lilypond is a very good tool, but the part on Gregorian chant is not maintained and very deep modifications would be needed to perfectly align the notes and text.

Source: https://gregorio-project.github.io/gregoriotex/index.html

> Around 15 years ago I would typeset orders of service in tex for our college chapel

Your chapel was very fortunate.

Good question, they considered it at some point:

> Lilypond is a very good tool, but the part on Gregorian chant is not maintained and very deep modifications would be needed to perfectly align the notes and text.

Source: https://gregorio-project.github.io/gregoriotex/index.html

Circa 2024[1]:

> Note, however, that there are some serious flaws in LilyPond regarding Gregorian notation (especially the non-modern version), and right now there is nobody who works on improving that...

1: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2024-10/msg...

Circa 2024[1]:

> Note, however, that there are some serious flaws in LilyPond regarding Gregorian notation (especially the non-modern version), and right now there is nobody who works on improving that...

1: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2024-10/msg...

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The Gregorio project – GPL tools for typesetting Gregorian chant

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