Isolated Neumes in Text

When writing academic or instructional works about Gregorian chant, you might want to print a neume directly in the text, rather than breaking into a complete score, in order to better illustrate what you are talking about. Fortunately, there are two ways to bring those neumes into your text, depending on whether you want a single or multiple glyphs (for a definiton of what Gregorio considers a neume and what it considers a glyph, see the structure page).

Nota Bene: If you want to change the size of the neumes inserted by either of these two methods, then you need to use `\grechangestaffsize`. When loaded the font containing the musical glyphs is sized to match the current staff size and this is a relationship which it is essential you preserve, otherwise your scores will come out weird. Fortunately, both these methods are insisitive to the usual LaTeX size changing commands, but if you're using something else to change font sizes, do not let it mess with the fonts loaded by GregorioTeX.

Single Glyphs

The first method works best if you neume consists of a single glyph of 5 or fewer notes and for which you know the name of the glyph you want (there is a handy table of glyphs at the end of GregorioRef where you can look up the names). In this case add the following macro definition to your preamble:

\makeatletter
\def\gretextglyph#1{{\gre@font@music\csname GreCP#1\endcsname}}
\makeatother

This command can then be used to insert the desired glyph anywhere in your text. For instance a quilisma is inserted as \gretextglyph{Quilisma}.

If you cannot find the glyph you want in the table at the back of GregorioRef, then it is probably a fused glyph: i.e., a glyph made by fusing two other glyphs together in a seamless fashion. All glyphs of 6 or more notes are made this way, as are some smaller ones. In this case you'll want to use the multiple glyph method below.

Multiple Glyphs

The second method is to employ a modified form of another trick: the short score. As a result, it is capable of entring any neume which can be reprsented in gabc regardless of the number of glyphs which go into it. As a bonus, you don't need to know (or look up) the names of the glyphs you want.

The basic form of the trick is to put a \gabcsnippet inside a minipage (in which we've turned "off" those score elements we don't want to see) and then put that minipage inside a \raisebox so that we can control its position:

\raisebox{0pt}[\height][\depth]{%
    \begin{minipage}{0.8cm}%
        \gresetlines{invisible}%
        \gresetclef{invisible}%
        \greseteolcustos{manual}%
	    \gabcsnippet{(fvEDC)}%
    \end{minipage}%
}%

The above block can be placed in your text exactly where you want it, or can be placed inside a macro definition in the preamble as you prefer.

Nota Bene: There are four distances in the above code block which you will have to tune for each neume that you insert:

  1. The first (0pt in the above) is the "raise" of the box, i.e., it is used to regulate how the neume aligns vertically with the text of the line it is on.
  2. The second (\height in the above) is how tall TeX should consider the neume, i.e., it is used to adjust the spacing between the line the neume is on and the line above it. \height in this case represents the "natural" height of the box contents (which should normally correspond to the height of your neume).
  3. The third distance (\depth in the above) is how far below the base line TeX should consider the neume to go (the depth), i.e., it is used to adjust the spacing between the line the neume is on and the line below it. \depth in this case reprsenents the "natural" depth of the box contents (which should normally be 0).
  4. The fourth distance (0.8cm in the above) is the width of the box containing the neume. You should pick it to be as tight to the neume as possible without causing a line break.
Works with Version:

4.1.0.