GregorioTeX

Yet another Gregorian chant TeX style?

At the beginning of the project, we didn't want to build a TeX style. We wanted to use an existing one. We tried some:

• Lilypond (documentation) is a very good tool, but the part on Gregorian chant is not maintained and very deep modifications are needed to perfectly align notes and text.
• MusiXTeX (documentation, cf. page 95) has a lot of glyphs missing.
• OpusTeX seems to be the best tool (the most popular at least). Sadly it is not free and quite buggy. The worst is that it is not maintained as its author (Andreas Egler) has almost disappeared. Last but not least, you must specify end of lines by hand.

GregorioTeX aims at:

• being a 100% free tool, using a free font.
• having a flexibility that the others do not have, by offering the possibility to change the height of the font of the text compared to the font of the notes, to calculate ends of lines automatically...
• using a very beautiful Gregorian chant font that have all glyphs drawn (not basic glyphs that will be combined by TeX).
• offering the possibility to everyone to build its own font that will not be limited to square notation (as all glyphs are defined) by having documentation on it.
• having a clear and commented code that enables everyone to improve it.

GregorioTeX construction

A great difficulty of GregorioTeX was to calculate automatically the ends of lines (to place the custo and the key). It is impossible to do so in TeX, as you have no control on it. Happily, it is possible in Omega with the primitives \localeleftbox{} and \localerightbox{} that place automatically something at the end of a line and at the beginning of the next line.

The gregorio font

The gregorio font has been made to be compatible with gregoria that was the original font of the project. It has basically the same dimensions.

The font contains every glyph possible with 5 tons of variation. It permits to have beautiful glyphs and well adapted to their shape. It also permits to build fonts that are not in square notation (very ancient notation for example), and that can't be described as combinations of linked punctum.

Utilisation de GregorioTeX

GregorioTeX ne peux pour l'instant être utilisé qu'avec gregorio, le code produit est complexe et ne peut être écrit à la main. Pour transformer un fichier gabc en fichier GregorioTeX, faites simplement :

You get an Omega file, that you can compile into a dvi file this way:

You get a dvi file. In modern distributions, you can directly treat this file like a standart dvi produced by TeX (with dvips or dvipdf). If dvips or dvipdf does not work because of virtual fonts, you can use odvips, a version modified to accept virtual fonts.