Eighth bar in GABC?

[Matthew Jarvis]

Hello,

I’m trying to render an eighth bar in GABC in order to reproduce what I see in the Dominican Processionarium of 1913 (Cormier) on page 342, of which I am preparing an edition (it’s not for ongoing liturgical use). See attached screenshot: the barline reaches from the second to the third line, but no further on either side. 

I understand this is not supported in Gregorio. Is there a way to make this possible?

Many thanks,

Fr Matthew Jarvis OP

[Matthias Bry]

Salve pater reverende,

You are right.

*Semantically* (not graphically), the closest thing is (^) ("divisio minimis") which, when using the usual font, outputs a small bar shorter than a quarterbar above the top line of the staff.

The cleanest solution that makes no changes to gregorio itself would be to customize the font and replace that bar with the B-bar as defined by Cormier, and use (^) in the GABC code.

I add fr. Petitjean FSVF who works on such things, for his information.

In Christo,

MB

--
Gregorio homepage: http://gregorio-project.github.io
Archives for the old mailing list: http://www.mail-archive.com/gregori...@gna.org/
To report a bug, please post to: https://github.com/gregorio-project/gregorio/issues
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Gregorio Users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to gregorio-user...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/gregorio-users/42b1c13e-7500-4002-9ac0-7ad627857772n%40googlegroups.com.

[Matthew Jarvis]

Thank you, Matthias!

I'm not sure how to modify the font, however. Is there some guidance on how to do this? 

I'm sorry I'm not very technical at that level!

Yours in Christ,

Fr Matthew OP

[Matthias Bry]

Salve pater reverende,

Guidance on font modification in gregorio is sparse. The short version (at least in my experience) was to install Fontforge on my Windows laptop, fail to get the Python integration working, install Fontforge on my Debian Linux server, manage to get the Python integration going there, find the correct glyph in Fontforge by looking at the Gregorio source code (what glyph is used to represent bars depends on the number of lines in the staff, a number that can vary between 1 and 5, 4 being only the default, if you did not know), open greciliae-base.sfd (the "source", editable font) in Fontforge and change said glyph to my liking, transfer it to my server, compile the font into TTF (the usable, but non-editable font format) using the Python-Fontforge script that comes with Gregorio, transfer the TTF back to my laptop.

You can have a go using my own result, assuming you use gregorio 6.1.0 and the [op] variant of the font thanks to \gresetgregoriofont[op]{greciliae}

Just locate greciliae-op.ttf on your system (in mine it's in C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Programs\MiKTeX\fonts\truetype\public\gregoriotex), back it up somewhere, and replace it with mine (attached), then try to compile (c4) A(d)ve(hi) (^) ma(f)ris(gh) (::)

Then promptly put the correct font file back there, because my font file will break as soon as you change the staff line count away from 4, and, more importantly, as soon as you update gregorio. This is only as a proof of concept.

The clean way to do it would be to create four new glyphs in greciliae-base, corresponding to bars in the 1st, 2nd (done here), 3rd and 4th intervals between lines, and change the gregorio core code to map those glyphs to (^) if the [op] option is used in the font choice; and then integrate this change into the main gregorio branch so that it does not break on updates, etc.

I can do it, but not without funding. Otherwise, Fr. Samuel might be willing.

In Christo,

Matthias

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/gregorio-users/3902ec83-4362-4224-b269-3371af980cf3n%40googlegroups.com.

[Jakub Pavlík]

(slight off topic)

LilyPond sucks at square notation in many ways, but ability to define arbitrary custom barlines is one of its strenths.

st 29. 4. 2026 v 17:51 odesílatel Matthias Bry <matthi...@gmail.com> napsal:

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/gregorio-users/CA%2BKjmK2wef5BzyY2sp6t_UWD%3Dz775B3J9G1i7H82-mdNL_%2BVvg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jörg Hudelmaier]

You could use a hack like in this example:

initial-style: 1;
name: Alleluia 30;
book: Antiphonae & Responsoria/Tomus III, p. 144;
occasion: Tempore Paschali;
annotation: 7c2{\gdef\GreDivisioMinimis#1#2#3{\lower11.9pt\hbox{\GreDivisioMinima{#1}{#2}{#3}}}};
%%
(c3)Al(g)le(h)lú(ij>)ia,(i) <v>\greheightstar</v>() al(ih>)le(fh)lú(gf>)ia,(e)  (^) al(fd)le(fhg)lú(e)ia.(e) (::) E(i) u(i) o(j) u(i) a(h) e.(ih) (::)

i.e. We redefine DivisioMinimis as DivisioMinima lowered by 11.9pt -- Note that the height of DivisioMinima ist just the distance between two stafflines. The 11.9pt is 0.7 times the default staffsize 17. If you change the staffsize you have to adjust it proportionally.

[Matthias Bry]

I oscillate between hilarity and horror at the sight of such a dirty hack hahahaha!

More seriously, if Fr. Matthew needs his score to render correctly on Gregobase, this would work, but as someone who has attempted to improve the quality of the data in Gregobase, I cannot possibly recommend it.

If Fr. Matthew just needs his score to render correctly in his own project, adding

\gdef\GreDivisioMinimis#1#2#3{\lower11.9pt\hbox{\GreDivisioMinima{#1}{#2}{#3}}}

to the tex preamble actually does work, and, pending a clean solution (adding those bars to gregorio), it is about as reasonable as changing the font like I have suggested, but easier.

In Christo,

Matthias

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/gregorio-users/e914cb79-f95d-4fed-9889-573c4ef05374n%40googlegroups.com.