Frustrated with Chant Notation -- Convert-ly or Lily4jEdit plugin bug?

[Paul Harouff]

I've been using Lilypond for the past week and just installed Lily4jEdit. I am transcribing a complete Eastern Orthodox Christmas Vigil church service from Russian Znamenny Chant to English and am extremely frustrated at how hard it is to troubleshoot command errors. It's taken me 4 days to get only 3 hymns done because all the undocumented tweaks that I've had to search for. It took me 4 hours just to figure out how to turn off the time signature. I'm still having trouble with text running off the page or getting centered in the margins instead of over or under the score.

 

I finally figured out that the only way to represent chant lyrics is to associate the first syllable and last syllable with their own notes then quote the text in between so it centers under the breve. This is the only way to force all of the lyrics to center under its own measure. Unfortunately, the justification is less than desirable because the quoted text is not padded, but it's readable.

 

I was expecting to have the whole service completed while I was on vacation this week. I've been having to compile after every measure to catch my errors in phrasing the English to the Russian melody. I'm hoping that using jEdit will help speed up the process, if I can figure out how to get the hyperlinks between the console and pdf windows working.

 

Anyway ... the bug:

 

My very first attempted procedure using the jEdit plugin was to update my file from 2.9.17 to 2.11.2.

 

I noticed that Convert-ly will not accept path names with spaces. I don't know if this bug is already reported or if the problem is the plugin is not passing the filename to Convert-ly with the path quoted properly. I had to map a drive letter to the folder where the file is located and remove spaces from the filename before the update would process.

 

Paul