Larger text is always a good thing, especially for us People with old eyes.

I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed some older octavos use italics for lyrics, which is much better for conserving horizontal space as it pair kerns at a much higher rate allowing you to put more characters on a single line. This also helps with sight reading as the notes are closer together, often do this with my octavos. It’s an older method that not a lot of European publishers utilized but works very well and it doesn’t have that clunky look of Roman type.

For church music (chant, in particular) it is an EXCELLENT choice.

What makes it excellent for chant?

I think I know the answer to this but does it have options for neumes and four line staves?

I find that music has some medium-message connection with its notation and that I can't sing chant to my satisfaction from modern notes. It's a mental hang-up but frankly I don't care to change it.

A program with maybe a neume plug-in that let you notate organum on the same four line staff would be amazing.

Yeah. MS Studio has the familiar neumes on the five-line staff but it’s outrageously bad, and people who only know Lilypond have tried to get me to use that over Gregorio, but the Lilypond documentation for chant shows why this is bad, and in fact Fr. Samuel is “one of us” such that he came up with a package to get Lilypond output in a LaTeX document.

Reminder in any case that later this fall, Charles Weaver is doing an introduction to Gregorio online for CMAA members iirc. Worth it!

It’s… gonna need a lot of work and really more knowledge of rhythm and how that’s reflected. I have something in the works (pray that it gets published!) where I talk about the primacy of rhythm in the old/classic Solesmes schools (so for doms Pothier and Mocquereau). And this is another example. You have to start somewhere, but Élie Roux spent months on end consecrated almost entirely to what became Gregorio…

@chant_supremacist: the reason Dorico is particularly good for church music is that it has true support for open meter. That means that doing chant transcriptions is supremely easy and flexible. Engraving accompaniments similar to the NOH is a walk in the park. You literally just enter music, plop in barlines as you go alone, select all, "hide stems" and bob's your uncle. Engraving hymns is very easy and you can get beautiful results with al the engraving option contols. The other thing that makes Dorico fundamentally different from all the other programs is "flows". You can have multiple pieces (or even just small snippets) of music within a single file, that all have the same engraving properties. Practically speaking, this means you can have a complete ordo for a liturgy within one file. I once did a tri-lingual Easter Vigil and had every response, hymn, chant, and bit of the ordinary, all as independent movements within the same file. Then I was able to engrave it all to match, and export each piece for placement within a worship aid. I had something on the order of 30 pieces of music, all within the same file—not 30 separate files. It was amazing.

@smvanroode et al...
I use Capella for less than half of what Dorico charges. You can write without a time signature (yes, there's a button for "no time signature"), which is great for chant and chant styles, thus you can put your bar lines anywhere you want and with a certain drawing tool you can even make quarter bars and half bars. There's also a provision for chant notes (the chant clef's not so hot, however). I've been using it for years and I love it. The latest version is Capella 9 which runs currently $248.
https://www.capella-software.com/us/
BMP

For Serviam and the other Dorico users, how easy is it to do psalm tones? In Finale, I do it using the non breaking space (Alt + Space) and I can get multiple words all under one note. Does Dorico have a similarly easy way to do this?

Thanks for the help Marc. Sorry, its, Ctrl + Space, not Alt + Space as I said above.

I have an older version of Finale I got about 6 years ago, so it probably is.