pslm

Tool for automatic pointing of psalm texts for the traditional formulae of Gregorian chant psalmody.

Problem and its solutions

When preparing booklets for chanted Divine Office, you probably have to - unless your schola is extremely skilled in Latin and psalmody - deal with pointing of the psalm texts.

• You can do so manually, which is a boring, tedious, error-prone task.
• You can use Benjamin Bloomfields online Psalm Tone Tool, which will also generate notated first verse for you
• or you can use pslm

installation

gem install pslm

Basic usage

Take prepared psalm texts

• Latin texts prepared by me
• Latin texts further extended by Jakub Jelínek
• Czech texts (from Denní modlitba církve)

Or prepare your own

TODO

pslm executable and its invocation

• simplest - pslm path/to/ps109.pslm By default pslm formats the psalm for LaTeX and prints the output to standard output. You can redirect the output to a file using your shell's capabilities or by means of the -o option: pslm -o ps109.tex path/to/ps109.pslm

• LaTeX output - is default

• pointing for a given tone - pslm -t VII.a path/to/ps109.pslm Pslm knows a basic set of psalm tones (based on 196x books) by name.

• pointing for custom tone pslm -a 2:2 -p 0:0 path/to/ps109.pslm If your favourite tone isn't supported or you don't like the default psalm tone set, you can specify number of accentuated (-a) and preparatory (-p) syllables in each half-verse.

• pointing style pslm -s underline path/to/ps109.pslm to underline accentuated syllables, pslm -s bold path/to/ps109.pslm to make them bold

• print to console with highlighting pslm -f console path/to/ps109.pslm (for geeks who prefer to chant psalms from the terminal :) )

• print all available options pslm -h

Use pslm when programming your own build tool

Especially if you use build scripts written in Ruby it may be more convenient to gain better control over pslm by using the underlying Ruby library directly instead of invoking the executable.

TODO add examples

History

I once wrote psalmpreprocessor as a relatively simple ad-hoc sollution; then I extended it step by step. It was ugly and dirty at the beginning and got only dirtier. Then I restructured it, but it didn't get much cleaner. Then I needed it for another, quite different typesetting project. ...

Years later I decided to make a standalone gem with the same (and some additional) functionality. (Hey, there is a bug in psalmpreprocessor.rb. I want to fix it. In a few weeks I should deliver that book for which the bug should be fixed. It means I don't want to break anything. It means I want to be secured by automatic tests. But psalmpreprocessor isn't easily unit-testable. ...)