alt.hn

4/17/2026 at 3:20:45 PM

The Gregorio project – GPL tools for typesetting Gregorian chant

 https://gregorio-project.github.io/index.html

by mcookly

4/17/2026 at 5:04:35 PM

I may be one of the few HN users for whom this is an extremely useful resource. I’m an Anglican priest, so I’m often scanning and pasting bits and pieces of chant into our bulletins. This will, I hope, allow me to create much cleaner looking chant texts in the future! Thank you for sharing it!

by cbfrench

4/17/2026 at 7:13:11 PM

Happy to share! There's nothing quite as distracting as a blurry scan of a chant/hymn.

You might be interested in an online editor [1] for small items. (I haven't used it much, but it seems good.)

[1]: https://www.sourceandsummit.com/editor/alpha/

by mcookly

4/17/2026 at 5:00:22 PM

I'm surprised this targets TeX rather than lilypond, which AFAIK is the gold standard for free (as in beer and speech) music engraving.

I checked, and lilypond also offers features for Gregorian chant notation [1]. Has anyone used both and is able to compare?

[1] https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.25/Documentation/notation/typese...

by CrazyStat

4/17/2026 at 5:31:20 PM

Good question, they considered it at some point:

> Lilypond is a very good tool, but the part on Gregorian chant is not maintained and very deep modifications would be needed to perfectly align the notes and text.

Source: https://gregorio-project.github.io/gregoriotex/index.html

by jdelfuego

4/17/2026 at 5:43:51 PM

I am probably one of the few people here that used this ‘in anger’. Around 15 years ago I would typeset orders of service in tex for our college chapel, and enjoyed typesetting the chant - this tool made it really easy and I could produce IMO beautiful documents.

Most of the time people used bitmaps which would be blurred/pixelated or not resize well

by jdsnape

4/17/2026 at 7:14:22 PM

> Around 15 years ago I would typeset orders of service in tex for our college chapel

Your chapel was very fortunate.

by mcookly

4/17/2026 at 7:04:19 PM

If anyone is interested in playing around with this wonderful tool, there's an online editor (edit: no affiliation). [1] It is much more responsive than compiling in TeX.

[1]: https://www.sourceandsummit.com/editor/alpha/

by mcookly

4/17/2026 at 5:23:49 PM

I’m interested in what may exist for Byzantine notation.

by insensible