A new website for making writing gregorian chant easier
  • agsmay
    Posts: 2
    Hello all!

    I have spent the past few months building a chant editor that runs in a web browser, and it has reached the point where it would benefit from being seen by people who actually engrave chant. It is at scriptoriumchantengraver.com It's free, no accounts required, nothing to install, no ads, and no solicitations for donations.

    My main impetus for creating this website was to make it easy for people to generate chant, up until now we've all had to learn the GABC notation and in my experience even after I knew how it worked, I would still have the check the reference sheet quite often to be able to get my chant formatted just right. So this website takes that away and gives the user an interactive interface to be able to edit chant more easily with a toolbar and a lot of keyboard shortcuts.

    It is new and I am sure there are still bugs lurking in many places. There is a Feedback button in the top bar which sends bug reports and suggestions straight to me, both are extremely valuable to me. Corrections about notation practice are especially welcome — I can write code, but I am not going to catch every place where the result differs from what the books actually print.

    Thanks and God bless!
    Thanked by 2m_r_taylor CHGiffen
  • m_r_taylor
    Posts: 403
    Wow, thank you.
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 3,753
    I would strongly urge using the latest standards for gabc which changed significantly over the years.

    For example, the text-right line should be commentary.

    What I call a soft flat that prints in something like Agnus IX only if a line break exists came in Gregorio 6.1 I think.

    Removing the custos at a line break and EUOUAE tags aren’t in the Source and Summit editor; it’s not clear that either are supported here, whether from source or by using the buttons to insert them without having to think about the code and its placement. Having another way to quickly check my work is nice, especially if the latest features are supported. I think Illuminare/S&S stopped at Gregorio 3.1 updates to gabc.

    Certain things are incompatible but can be added together. A dotted note is always ictic. That’s not to say that you never see the printed mark, because instructional texts use it, but the actual scores never do. An episema and dot are incompatible. It allows you to place the ictus twice on one note.

    The ictus placement seems fixed below a note/neume; with one exception that has been hard to solve Gregorio does it pretty well. (Ictus on bottom, episema on top does not seem right to me as an « always, no exceptions » norm of Solesmes/Desclée typesetting).

    But for what it’s worth, a lot of the manipulation is left to the user between gabc modifications and LaTeX commands. gabc is a description language, with some of the glyphs being encoded directly in the typeface itself; other things come from the combination of glyphs to provide maximum coverage as much as possible (sometimes you need to draw new glyphs!).

    The ictus is too close to the podatus by default.
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  • Richard MixRichard Mix
    Posts: 3,009
    Would you care to share a link, or a url?
  • agsmay
    Posts: 2
    https://scriptoriumchantengraver.com/
    The url is in the post but it's hard to see. Here it is as a hyperlink and I'll edit the initial post to have it that way too.
    Thanked by 1CHGiffen
  • lmassery
    Posts: 450
    This is a game changer for many people, thank you for your efforts
  • TCJ
    Posts: 1,070
    This is great! I'll have to get to work on some chants soon.
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