Use of a scanner with Meinrad fonts
  • Bruce E. Ford
    Posts: 431
    I hope that someone who owns a scanner and also has the Meinrad fonts on his computer will be kind enough to perform an experiment for me. I do not own a scanner and do not wish to invest in one unless this experiment works.

    Would you scan a page from the Graduale or other chant book, save it as text, and then see if you can edit it, using the Meinrad fonts?

    If I could do this, I could produce a great deal more in conventional chant notation. The Meinrad fonts are somewat tedious to use. Yesterday I typeset an introit, offertory, and communion. The job took considerably more than an hour.
  • Richard R.
    Posts: 776
    Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, OCR will not be able to interpret the chant notation as its Meinrad equivalent. You could incorporate the scanned pictures into a new file, and do a little reformatting around them (headings and whatnot). If you have specific things you need, I might just have them already transcribed, but my things are formatted (somewhat eccentrically) for MSWord 2003. Still, you would at least have the Meinrad characters you need.
  • Adam Bartlett
    Posts: 533
    Bruce-- You might try your experiment with one of the many chant books that are scanned and on the musicasacra.com home site. I really don't think it will work though, not without some kind of OCR character recognition layer which I have never seen before.

    I concur with the tediousness of the Meinrad fonts. I think that the best way to typeset chant will soon be Gregorio. The typesetting process is extremely streamlined in comparison to using a font, most formatting is done automatically and there are formatting options, etc. The only problem is that in order to use it right now you have to work form the command line, which most people probably aren't comfortable with. They have plans to build a GUI, but who knows how long that might take. I personally wish that a benefactor would help push this project along as it would help us with much of the work that will need to be done when we receive the new translation of the Roman Missal.
  • Carl DCarl D
    Posts: 992
    Yes, that's the piece that's missing - the OCR to take the raster image and translate any kind of meaning out of it. But it certainly does raise an interesting question: Chant notation is fairly regular and simple, so how hard would it be to create the OCR algorithms? You'd never make any money on it, of course, so it would have to be a labor of love.

    Way beyond my skill level, unfortunately....
  • Arthur Connick
    Posts: 496
    I would tend to agree with Mr. Bartlett that the ultimate solution will be something like Gregorio. The next step will be a database of chants so cases you would normally only need to format the music to fit the layout of your publication. And the final step will be to have functionality that overlays random squiggles to create triplex versions.
  • Bruce E. Ford
    Posts: 431
    Thanks to all who replied to my query.

    Richard R: Thank you for your offer of things you have already transcribed; but my hope was that I could copy pages from the Graduale of Gregor und Taube site and then make changes required for accommodation of English words. For work with semi-syllabic chant that ability to do this would not make much difference; but for work with melismatic chant it would save a great deal of time. It's too bad that it's impossible.
  • Bruce E. Ford
    Posts: 431
    I type too fast.

    Richard R: Thank you for your offer of things you have already transcribed; but my hope was that I could copy pages from the Graduale or from Gregor und Taube site and then make changes required for accommodation of English words. In work with semi-syllabic chant the ability to do so would make little difference; but in work with melismatic chant it would save a great deal of time. It's too bad that it's impossible.
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