Saturday, November 29, 2008

Latest updates...slow going

It has been several months since my last update, and for that I apologize. I've had a number of things come up which have slowed work. I'll explain a little more in detail later.

BUT! I have made significant progress. First, the revisions to the Common of Saints are complete. There still may be a few things to do, but I'm confident that it will be much easier to use now, especially for III class feasts.

I can't recall if this was done in my last edition, but I've got most of the bugs worked out of the latin hyphenation. It's probably not even close to perfect, but it should be a LOT better. It's also working well enough now to fully justify the text, so I personally think that looks much better.

I've made some significant changes to the way the hymns appear. The first line of each strophe now begins with a slightly enlarged red letter, helping to denote the break a little better. I've also changed the font size, so they aren't quite so tiny any more.

Speaking of font size, I've bumped the whole thing up just a bit. It's not a huge jump, and it still probably won't be big enough for some; but it's now about the same size of most of my old breviaries.

Now on to the Proper of Saints. Work has gone slowly, mainly because of some of the feasts I've encountered. The most tedious was the feast of Christ the King, which is a relatively new feast. As such, there are no public-domain English translations of the hymns for that feast. I have endeavoured to do my own translations. They are not perfect, and there are some strophes I intend to change at some point...but it's better than nothing. This alone took considerable time.

Okay, so the bottom line is that the Proper of Saints is now complete from mid August until the beginning of February, and also a large part of July. So all in all, I think that I've completed just under 8 months.

Right now I'm working on another major project: The hymns for the Feast of the Assumption were changed in 1950, and so I've got two more hymns to translate! I have just about finished the "rough" literal translations, and then I'll need to do the poetic translations which incorporate rhyme and meter. This of course takes time. So...the next update may be a while!