Re: Lyrics to hymn - new user

[Carl Peterson]

On Wed, Oct 16, 2013 at 10:54 PM, Garrett McGilvray <address@hidden> wrote:

On Oct 16, 2013, at 9:05 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

> So here is the challenging question: what would be required to have a
> hymn typesetter be able to look at the documentation of LilyPond, and
> start typesetting hymns with the delivered doc and styles within an
> hour?
>

There are a couple of useful snippets for hymns, but for me the trouble was that they all had each part as a separate voice, whereas most of the hymnals I am familiar with use shape notes with the parts on each staff grouped in a single voice as a chord. The shape notes are super easy (thank you LilyPond!). The difficulty comes with the occasional split voices or where two parts share a single pitch, necessitating stems going both directions from a single note head. Carl has helped me get going, but getting that kind of music to play nicely with lyrics was the challenge for me.


And now off topic but in response to Carl...

On Oct 16, 2013, at 8:46 PM, Carl Peterson <address@hidden> wrote:

> Regarding "a lot less fighting to get right," I am acquainted with a number of people who have been involved in publishing hymnals with shape notes. I constantly see them talking about all the work arounds to make shape note stems work correctly, to get the spacing right, etc., etc. My comment is always, "Or you could just use LilyPond." In talking with one person who does a lot of hymn setting in Finale. He says it takes him at least an hour to set a hymn and get it right and fix all the quirks of Finale.

For the me the shape notes aren't too hard. It isn't obvious how to set it. Honestly, even though it is a GUI, I have to spend as much time in the documentation sometimes as I do for LilyPond as a new user. But once you learn how, the only annoyance there is that Finale is not smart enough to flip the Fa note head depending on stem direction so you have to manually select a new note head for every instance.

However, my greatest annoyance was this: When trying to make versions to be displayed by PowerPoint, the goal is to have large text for readability without having one measure per line, and this means a lot of manual measure spacing, then moving the alignment of lyrics and notes manually throughout. So I would spend a good deal of time working on all of this custom spacing, and then I would notice one little error in the music I had input. A simple fix, right? Nope. I make the one little change, and the entire spacing reflows back to default, negating a good deal of work. I really hated that. I'm hoping I can replace Finale for good in making PowerPoint versions of hymns.

I was originally going to respond to David directly, but I'll piggyback on this one since it plays into some things I was going to mention.

David:

Frameworks. LilyPond's advantage is that I can give someone with only a basic text editor the notation cheat sheet or something similar to it and a template file defining each voice as a variable and they can notate a hymn. I can recruit dozens or hundreds of people who have no actual LilyPond knowledge and give them relevant work (as opposed to the trivial "busy work" one usually has to give to unskilled laborers). On the other hand, with Finale, I am limited by the number of people who have Finale and the technical skill to use it well.

There are also some things that hymnals often need that require significant workarounds in LilyPond or some fairly clunky use of LaTeX and lilypond-book, in my experience. One is hymn numbering (aka score numbering). Another is score footers, which don't exist in the same sense that score headers do, but are particularly relevant for hymnals that wrap hymns across a spread and then start another hymn in the middle of the page, since I know at least two hymnals that include the bibliographic and copyright information about a hymn below the last system. Right now, you have to use a custom markup block, which to me violates the principle of separating content from layout that you have in a header block. Also, my system uses a customized version of the part combiner .scm file with a couple of different parameters in the logic to allow for what I typically see in hymnals.

There is a LOT more that I could say on this subject, but I don't want to overwhelm the list on one post (if I haven't already).

Garrett:

I'm probably going to have to post my template system or make it available on git or something. The problem is that I have about four or five layers of files. I've been trying to wait until I have it "finished" and more user-friendly. My template allows for automatic part combining while still preserving the individual voices. It is also designed so that I can build the book and slide versions of the hymn off the same music and lyric files, with just a different "output" (top-level) file. I've attached an example of one of my original works to show the final output. Depending upon my font selection, I can size the lyrics on the slide larger than any of the commercially available packages I've seen.

This is a particularly salient point for hymnals, as you could have 1000+ hymns to set. It can take a year or more after the book is published to convert the files and release the digital edition. With my system, you can produce both simultaneously and any changes would simply be a matter of editing one file and recompiling the affected ones (particularly useful if you have one tune paired with multiple texts or vice versa).

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Carl

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