Hi everyone, long time no see.

I have spent 2020 working on typography, which has long interested me, and now I have time. Hooray!

So that meant getting back into GABC, Gregorio, etc. and making some booklets that I've long wanted to make. They're imperfect, the reasons for which I'll get to in a minute.

I had to set the Kyrie from the absolution at the catafalque, and lo and behold, Source and Summit has totally revamped Illuminare Score Editor. It mostly works really well. Being able to produce a PNG file directly is convenient; I prefer PDFs, but I am not quite skilled enough to manipulate them in Scribus to get them to fit on half-letter or A5 paper. PNGs work better, and the ability to set the size more precisely is super helpful. Now, I haven't figured it out, but it works well enough, e.g. if I set it for 4.7 inches, then drag the downloaded image into Scribus, I can set the frame to the desired width, adjust the image to the frame, and then free scale it as needed. So, if I'm working on A5 paper, with margins of 14.1 mm, that gives me about 4.7 in, and I just adjust the file, making it narrower, when I drag it. I don't know why Scribus makes it larger.

EB Garamond is a nice typeface, because it's based on actual designs inherited from Claude Garamond and Robert Granjon; the designer scanned and adjusted the image of the original metal pieces. Because it's a Renaissance design that transitions into the early Baroque, I use it for my projects: booklets, anything where I'd otherwise use TNR, etc. So I'm delighted that the chant text can be in the same typeface as the text of the rest of the booklet.

However, as a word of caution for those of you who make the most of typefaces: it's incomplete, with missing characters (like accented small capitals in the OpenType version of the regular font) or has weird kerning issues; just today I learned that the apostrophe in "qu'à," a necessary combination in French, is kerned so that the apostrophe clashes with the accent. It also is missing what I consider really basic Unicode support… Alas, it seems abandoned, but it's still better than pretty much every version of Garamond out there in terms of the pure design. Plus, Granjon was well-known as a Catholic printer, which is quite cool.

It's also nice that you can adjust the size of the text (again, which matches the rest of the booklet, or not), the staff, etc. Now, the crop tool is great, but overzealous, and I can't seem to get things like iij. to show up correctly when they're at the end of a line with a double bar, e.g. in a Kyrie.

Anyways, I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I'm not sure if I will go back and reset everything now, which would take quite a while, or continue to use the versions from Gregobase otherwise, as at least some things fit quite nicely, but the thought is tempting, because making the type match would be nice too…