I have just completed generating a psalter (that is, the psalms, with
the tones written out in full with the words), about 400 pp of A5,
with gregorio and gregoriotex. Of course, psalm tones are simple and
repetitive, so the ligatures are hardly tested. But it is a good test
for line-breaking and so on.
Overall, gregorio(tex) worked very well. I did not adjust any
gregoriotex file by hand.
My gregorio(tex) installation is still built from an svn version
before 0.9.2 (using pdflualatex, not lamed); if I can reproduce the
bugs once I have installed the latest version, I'll raise proper bug
reports with test cases.
There was only one serious bug: if the first word was the single
letter `O', then the gregoriotex file could not be processed.
This can be worked around by writing O{} instead.
There were some minor and rare problems:
- occasionally a line was too long. Setting \tolerance and
\emergencystretch fixed this.
- occasionally there was space within a word (because the first
syllable had a long enough ligature) but no hyphen was generated.
- occasionally a divisio occurred at the start of a line.
- In just one verse, I needed parentheses in the text. I discovered
by looking at the source that these could be quoted by <v>...</v>:
<v>(yea,</v>(h)
However, this does not appear to be documented.
I also had a problem which I suspect is just me with a bad or old
installation: the flexa of two notes wasn't found in the font, and so
was missing in the output (at _ appeared a box, the unknown char):
Missing character: There is no _ (6145) in font greciliae!
Looking at pages as a whole, it seemed to me that the first note in a
staff was still a little too close to the clef when the first word of
a line starts with a vowel. They're not touching as they used to be,
but compared with good books they're still too close. But this is not
really a problem, just an aesthetic judgement.
It was awkward getting at the gabc header fields (name, anotation,...)
in the tex file, for titling. I wrote a trivial script to pick them
out from the gabc and create a simple tex file which could be \input
into the main tex file. This is below in case anybody else wants it.
I have some further thoughts on the header fields, but this is a
separate matter.
#!/usr/bin/python
# Convert the headers at the start of a gabc file to Latex definitions
# so that we can use them.
from sys import stdin
for __line in stdin:
if __line.startswith ("%%"):
break
__colon_pos = __line.find (":")
__header_name = __line[:__colon_pos].replace("-","")
__header_val = __line[__colon_pos+1:-2]
print "\\newcommand{\\gabc" + __header_name + "}{" + __header_val +"}"
--
David Stone
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