Planning Liturgy of the Hours - Morning/Evening Prayer
  • irishtenoririshtenor
    Posts: 1,320
    I've never had to do this before -- what do you recommend? What do you wish you knew when you began doing LOTH? How to make worship aid/pew booklet?

    I would be grateful for any resources to which you could point me.
  • BenBen
    Posts: 3,114
    .
  • BenBen
    Posts: 3,114
    [Edited on 3/17 for readability and adding one more resource]

    Here's a quick run through of the resources that I use for worship aids, and in particular LOTH worship aids, although you could easily adapt specifics to your own situation.

    Text content - Divine Office
    This site is awesome. You can look up the liturgy of the hours for today, and any day in the near future by clicking the "tomorrow" link, then finding a date using the URL schema:

    http://divineoffice.org/?date=YYYYMMDD

    Of course, you'd want to at least do a spot check with the text to a breviary, but every time I've used it, it's been very accurate.


    Typesetting - Scribus (best) or Microsoft Word (works)
    Scribus is great. It's a FREE professional level typesetting system. A wee bit buggy, but that's fine with me. Just save frequently, don't chain too many text boxes together, and you'll be fine.

    There's a little bit more of a learning curve, but if you are fairly techey (like me), you shouldn't have too much trouble. Just keep playing with it, it'll pay off in the long run (it's what I used for my book on the universal prayer, see sample below). Combined with the meinrad fonts (see below), you can do awesome things with scribus. I did a 70 page book recently with it (here's a sample)). It's amazing.

    You can make wonderful aids like this, which I eventually downsize, and print on a single folded 8.5 x 11.


    Music notation - Meinrad Fonts
    Whatever typesetting program you use, the meinrad fonts will be very helpful to you, for both neumes and modern notation, including stemless and stemmed. Also a little learning curve, but it's not bad.

    Finally, if you're not fimilair with chanted LOTH, I'd check out a copy of the Mundelein Psalter. You can easily reproduce offices from the Mundelein into worship aids, such as in my link above, using the meinrad fonts and a typesetting program.

    Another great advantage of these fonts is the ease. Of course, you could break out gregorio or finale to do all your music, but do you really want to do that for the single clef and 5 notes needed for a psalm tone? Everything can be kept right in the document this way.


    Another Option for Putting Neumes in your Worship Aid - Scribus
    I know scribus directly supports tex and gregorio, which could be a great option, particularly if you're planning on using scribus already. Gregorio has such a wonderful output. I'll have to try this sometime and post on how it goes.
  • ryandryand
    Posts: 1,640
    Great, Ben.
  • Kathy
    Posts: 5,507
    Ben, this is incredibly helpful!
  • BenBen
    Posts: 3,114
    Also, for all you Tex wizzes, scribus supposedly supports tex boxes, and also lillypond, but I'm not ready for any of that yet, but just know it's in there. Somewhere...