Re: Lyrics to hymn - new user

[Garrett McGilvray]

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.