Hacker News

The Gregorio project – GPL tools for typesetting Gregorian chant

55 points by mcookly 10 hours ago | 9 comments

cbfrench 8 hours ago

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!

mcookly 6 hours ago

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/

CrazyStat 8 hours ago

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...

jdelfuego 8 hours ago

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

jancsika 7 hours ago

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...

jdsnape 8 hours ago

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

mcookly 6 hours ago

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

Your chapel was very fortunate.

mcookly 6 hours ago

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/

insensible 8 hours ago

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