how do you make Gregorian chant fonts?
  • RagueneauRagueneau
    Posts: 2,592
    Friends,

    On a PC, how do you make Gregorian chant fonts? Meinrad fonts? Where do you purchase them? Are they hard to learn?

    I apologize for my ignorance in this area. Any help will be much appreciated.
  • same as any other font. Install and select it for typing.
  • You can purchase the Meinrad Font here. There are instructions on how to use them included. I think that the Meinrad fonts are rather laborious to use, but they still seem to be the best solution available at the time. I think that Gregorio will eventually be the best method, but they need to develop a good GUI first (using it currently requires working from the command line!)
  • Caeciliae - free, powerful...easy to use.


    The Caeciliae site became a testing site for another project. I'm happy to send you the latest release of Caeciliae until it gets it's site back. Just send me an email (matthew@osjoseph.org).

    -Bro. Matthew Spencer, OSJ
  • I don't understand why no one has come out with a font of all the note shapes that would be compatible with Finale. The basic program has been out for about 20 years. There are many fonts available for it, including guitar chord fret symbols. All of the music engraving functions are there, include selecting how many lines you use on the staff. Its lyric tool is very good. I guess I'll just wait till it happens. It's out of my realm of influence.
  • Medieval is the font for Finale but it is not cheap.
  • I've used both Caeciliae and Meinrad, and I think Caeciliae is much more logical. The codes for creating neums include numbers for the position of the note on the staff and letters that correspond to the kind of neum. So after you've set a few notes you can remember what you're doing without consulting the instructions. Meinrad's codes are completely random or seem so to me.

    Caeciliae was not fully functional when I attempted to use it with Word, but with Quark or InDesign it's perfect.
  • CAECILIAE IS AWESOME.

    With a very little bit of practice you can type out chants at a nice speed. Very logical.
  • Consider checking this page and also this page (both from the same site) with several free fonts for typesetting scores of gregorian chant. Both Festa Dies (and its upgrade Joseph Potier) and Cecilia are included. There are tutorials too. I do not claim that using these fonts is easy, but it works. (The site is in Spanish, I'm afraid. The author, Juan Andrés Alzate, is Colombian.)
  • Gregoire. A tiny bit limited, but it's free & has a GUI. I have to get a lot of stuff done fast and don't have the time to spend typing various combinations of characters. The documentation is in French, though.

    http://gregoire.tele.free.fr/en/