We started working in Spring 2020 on translating medieval plainchant into square notation, and it became apparent that we had to develop a convenient typesetting system for the Old Roman and Beneventan notation, currently not implemented in available sofware. The long-term aim of this project is to build a network of researchers, who study manuscripts containing rare or unique symbols, and are interested in transcriptions for academic publication.

Fonts

The first goal is to design and develop a new font set representing Old Roman and Beneventan notation. At the current stage, we have 30 new glyphs, drawn using FontForge and designed to seamlessly integrate with the existing greciliae and Joseph_Pothier fonts. They are available in a dedicaded repository, and there is a document showcasing them. We plan to make all fonts available, bundled in a new version of Gregorio.

Gregorio

The second goal is to integrate the new glyphs into an usable piece of software. The natural choice is of course integrate them in Gregorio. We developed a fork, which is currently in Alpha stage. The main issue at the moment is to let the build and install phase automatically deal with the new font.

We aim at having our fork pulled into the main Gregorio branch, if this is feasible.

Licensing

The accompaning documentation and new font is Copyright (C) 2020-2022 Old Roman Neumes, and is released under a custom license, which is inspired by the SIL Open Font License. The only addition to the SIL OFL license is the requirement to acknowledge the authors in other derivative works using the new font.