The Recovering Choir Director

The chant fonts prepared by the St. Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana are quite impressive. You have to get used to working with them, but once you do it’s a pretty quick and easy set. For the purposes of publishing a worship aid in MS Word, these are much easier to work with than importing graphics into Word from Finale Allegro.

A few tips on working with the fonts:

• Read the documentation. Many of the characters are only available through ALT+xxxx keystrokes, so you’ll want to get familiar with them. The monks have provided a PDF booklet that you can print out and fold for quick reference. Very useful.
• Outline your chants. For example, most of the chant lines I’ll be working with for the Evening Prayer Project are psalm tones with some neumatic terminations. To save time, I type in each of the psalm tones into a different document, then save the document as “Template”. Now, when I edit the worship aids, I just copy the psalm tone I need to use from the “Template” file, paste it to the new one and customize to fit the text.
• For a worship aid, use a reasonable font size. For our Evening Prayer booklet, a 36 point font will do quite nicely. For others, a 48 point will do a better job. Take into consideration your target assembly (or market).

Granted, this font package is $50. Still, I’d have to say that the money was very well spent. A more detailed review will follow.