How to alter staff lines in Gregorio?
  • OMagnumMysterium
    Posts: 269
    I'm wondering if there is any way to alter the staff lines in Gregorio. I don't see the staff in the chant fonts (at least at first glance) so I'm guessing it is something that Gregorio calculates independently of the notation font loaded. I'm using LaTeX. What I'm trying to achieve is light grey bars which sit behind the notes, positioned to indicate where the half steps fall on the staff. See example below:
    image
    blank staff.png
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  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 2,336
    Fr Samuel would know if this is possible.
  • igneusigneus
    Posts: 391
    This can be done in LilyPond.

    (There is certainly a way to do exactly the thing you want, but I'm not there yet.)
    coloured_staff_lines.png
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  • OMagnumMysterium
    Posts: 269
    Thanks. I've tried to learn LilyPond before, but decided at the time that it wasn't worth the trouble. Is there a semi-simple way to run Gregorio through LilyPond in LaTeX? At any rate, regardless of what middle steps I go through, I want to use LaTeX for actually compiling books.

    LaTeX might be able to render the grey bars if I could somehow relate to it where the staff is. The width could just be the page width between margins, except that the first line messes that up with the drop cap. I may play around with it and see how close I can get from a LaTeX command approach, but it probably requires commands more advanced than I know how to use.

    Matthew, do you know how I might contact Fr. Samuel?
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 2,336
    Oh boy, you’ve been missing out. Join the https://groups.google.com/g/gregorio-users ">mailing list.
  • OMagnumMysterium
    Posts: 269
    Thanks.
  • igneusigneus
    Posts: 391
    Here's how to do it in LilyPond.
    coloured_staff_lines2.png
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    Thanked by 1OMagnumMysterium
  • igneusigneus
    Posts: 391
    For LilyPond scores in LaTeX documents see https://ctan.org/pkg/lyluatex
  • igneusigneus
    Posts: 391
    But it's probably fair to say that square notation support in LilyPond is flawed. If you're lucky, you may get tolerable results. Simple genres like hymns or Divine Office antiphons often come out all right. Anything melismatic almost always gets botched in one way or another.
  • chonakchonak
    Posts: 9,217
    Offhand, I can think of a rather unpleasant way to get this effect: you could use the TikZ graphics option in LaTeX to create a graphic underlay which would contain the light gray bars, but you'd have to work out their positions on the page by experimentation.

    It would use methods somewhat like this example which draws a graph-paper pattern under the contents of a page:

    https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/311402/graph-paper-as-an-underlay
  • OMagnumMysterium
    Posts: 269
    Thanks. I have gotten help from the gregorio users group. I've been able to achieve what I'd been hoping, except it doesn't work for the first line of each chant. Hopefully I can find a way to remedy that. If anyone is interested in the code I can post it, but it's fairly long. It's basically just redefining \gre@generatelines.

    I will keep the idea of LilyPond in my back pocket. For the moment though, I've been having the easiest time of using a combination of LaTeX, Gregorio, MuseScore, and FontForge for getting various sorts of normal and special scores.
    AlteringStaffLines-MostlyWorks.pdf
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  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 2,336
    Yeah. That works nicely; though I am strongly considering removing MS 3.6.2 and keeping 4 but using 3.7 Evolution for certain bits. Stuff like “can’t silence voices in one click from a mixer” which happens with 4 due to the redesigns is really inefficient for me.
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