So much is clarified by having different noteheads for whole and half notes.
Agree, but this seems to be a problem only for the accompanied chant. The first example I posted is more conventional:
I guess I could update the chant accompaniment to use modern notation entirely.
I was a little off-topic from what James said. I meant not hollow-vs-filled noteheads, but notice that these old engravings used the same punch for whole and half notes. It took me a long time to get used to reading that, decades ago. I was thinking to say, with the clarity of modern noteheads, you can get away with strange things like centering a long note in its rhythmic space (which I don’t recommend!)
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Hmm. The example where you’ve got two beamed white notes – which are apparently the same duration as one semibreve 
The beaming is really just showing the plainchant neum groups. (Arguably you could use slurs rather than beams.)
I’d actually be tempted to use halved note values for that plainsongy one; but not for Wareham.
Do you mean centering a single semibreve in the bar? That’s highly recommend!
Nope, I meant in the space of shorter notes, as James mentioned in his post #15. The first downbeat in Wareham (post #10) has the whole notes sort-of-centered on the 2 soprano half notes rather than aligned on the beat, as was often done in manuscript at the time.
Centering when everyone has only a full-bar note value is only right. (In fact, I consider myself the chief advocate of it around here.)
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Thanks, I was actually referring to the neumes. It’s getting a bit complex, and I want to stay in Dorico for it. Might not be possible.
Yes, for the grouped neums, you’ll have to do that outside of Dorico. (I wait to be proved wrong… Any such attempt would probably involve countless notehead sets and manual adjustments.)
Thanks. I can see I’m going to have to simply construct these and place them above the standard notation without trying to match the spacing of voice columns. I suppose that’s OK.
Anyone out there proficient in chant notation able to help me make these in a 3rd-party program and turn them into PDFs?
You’ll want to use a GABC engine to do this. It’s not that hard once you get used to it; I’ve toyed with the idea of making a stream deck profile to speed up and remember the codes for me, but have never spent the time. I use the source and summit editor, but there are others as well.
As for the melodies, it might be worth checking on the Gregobase repository first, as you might find the exact thing you need coded for you, or at least find one that is close and would require minor tweaking which would still be faster than coding from scratch.
Insert manual line breaks so that you have the correct neumes on each line to match your Dorico score, and then slice and dice it in indesign and tweak the spacing from there.
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In some instances, perhaps.
It drives me nuts in old editions when you have a long line of reciting tone text that starts in one place and the notes are centered in the bar and way off to the right. So you cannot scan the note and beginning text at the same time. Makes sight reading very difficult.
So if you mean this, then OK:
But if you mean anything other than this arrangement for reciting tones, then good heavens please no:
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This page is a good example for me of why I REALLY liked Romano’s suggestion of having a modern version on the facing page. Or perhaps just SOME pages in the front or back with modern notation facing and comments as sort of an illustrated version?
Even if it’s just to collect, the history seems diminished if I don’t understand it. Else id be like the story of the seed that fell on hard ground. I might be interested in the tradition, but wouldn’t have taken much away.
Or you know, it’s your project and I’m just wrong. 
I thought about the modern version on the facing page, but that would make the book some 1200+ pages…
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What if you did 20 or whatever that were good exemplars with the modern facing, and put a one page index to those at the front or something? Illustrated King James style, sorta.
You say that like it’s a bad thing! 
My liber has that many pages!
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Yeah, but you didn’t pay to print it. 
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There’s 968 pages as it is, including c. 50 pages of indexes!
Here’s some food for thought. Took about 40 mins, all told; which including some faffing, and changing my mind.
Should get the whole thing done in 3 months!
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That’s really nice, Ben. How did you get the neumes? Just inserted them be judged them around? Worth the work?
I made the empty 4-line staff in Dorico, and then placed the neumes in Affinity Publisher. One of Affinity’s advantages is that you can edit the individual elements of the notation PDF on the page.
I already have a template document for writing plainchant in Affinity (originally done in Illustrator), so it was just a matter of dragging the right neum to the right place.
I dare say that trying to get output from Dorico and the ABC Gregorio chant-o-matic to line up together would take a lot of time, and probably end up needing some manual shunting anyway.
Given that only a small number of the hymns show plainchant, and most of those are just single-note neums, which you could do in Dorico, I don’t think it’s too much work.
Once I have everything set up – page template, paragraph styles, grab-bag of correctly sized neums, hymn text to paste, etc – I reckon I could probably do a page like this in under 30 minutes. I had to do the beam splitting manually, too.
Incidentally, I can’t find a way to reduce the gap between the key sig and the first note.
I’m still looking through my font menagerie for a better font for the numerals. New Century Schoolbook Bold works quite well, though something else may be closer.
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That is really very fine, Ben. Bravo
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