Editing palimpsests

[Tarcisio Balbo]

Good afternoon everyone! I hope you can offer some helpful advice to a newcomer to Illuminare.

I'm working on a scholarly paper about some liturgical-musical palimpsests, and due to space constraints in the publication, I'd like to provide the editor with transcriptions instead of reproductions of the original manuscripts. Naturally, the palimpsests have many gaps, which I've partially addressed by leaving the note marker empty between the syllables of the text. However, I'm struggling with three issues (the first two are illustrated in the attached image):

1. Is there a way to reproduce the punctum longum in the red box? At the moment, I’ve rendered it as a tristropha, but I’d like to show the original form of the neume.

2. When a musical gap coincides with the end of a section, the double barline is not correctly aligned (green boxes), despite the placeholder for the neume; is there a way to align everything properly?

Third issue, not shown in the example: some palimpsests are in adiastematic notation (a single-line staff). In Illuminare, is there a way to display only one staff line, corresponding to the F key?

Thanks to anyone who is willing and able to help!

[Matthias Bry]

Illuminare is useful for previewing simple scores, but it is not a GABC compiler. The following assumes you switch to gregoriotex.

1. Punctum longum: h!h!h

2. Could you define, or, better, draw what you would consider "properly aligned"?

3. A single-line staff is not adiastematic notation since it still allows the reader to know the heights of notes. The standard way to change the number of lines in the staff is by using the staff-lines header, but it restricts the pitches available to you (from the pitch below a single extra line below the bottom line, to the pitch above a single extra line above the top line). Consider toggling off staff line visibility (\gresetlines{invisible}) and then printing a single line explicitly, but I'm not sure of the best way to do this. Actual adiastematic neumes can be typeset using NABC, see https://ctan.math.illinois.edu/support/gregoriotex/doc/GregorioNabcRef.pdf

In Christo

M

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[Tarcisio Balbo]

Thank you so much for all the guidance. In fact, after some reflection, I was thinking of studying GregorioTeX to resolve all the issues I’ve encountered with Illuminare. That said (and with a few adjustments it's proving to be a workable solution), the NABC renderer turns out to be more versatile for displaying complex scores like the ones I’m working on, and I’ve also managed to fix the correct placement of the double barlines, which in Illuminare weren’t positioned properly when the syllables of the text didn’t contain notes.

I still don’t know how to optimally handle the adiastematic sources: NABC displays St. Gall or Laon neumes, but my sources are Beneventan or, more likely, rare examples of Norman notation. In the worst case, I’ll publish facsimiles of the originals, paying the reproduction rights to the library that holds them.

Thank you again, truly and sincerely.

[R. Padraic Springuel]

For your punctum longum, I would suggest the punctum linea: h=

For the adiastemic notation, if you have the skills (or are willing to learn), I would suggest creating new fonts to represent the different notation sources. Then it would be a relatively simple matter of instructing GregorioTeX to use your font for NABC instead of the St Gall or Laon ones that we have already. 

✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝✝
Fr. Samuel, OSB
(R. Padraic Springuel)
St. Anselm’s Abbey
4501 South Dakota Ave, NE
Washington, DC, 20017
202-269-2300
(c) 202-853-7036

PAX ☧ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ

On Apr 23, 2025, at 7:23 AM, Tarcisio Balbo <tarcisi...@vecchitonelli.com> wrote:



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