The OfficiumDivinum Project
There are many excellent projects to make computers speak liturgically. The gregorio project makes producing beautiful chant scores easy (and TeX and LaTeX make producing beautiful documents easy); divinumoficium makes the divine office (from the pre-tridentine monastic books through to the final reforms before it was replaced with the Liturgia Horarum) and the Mass in the ancient Roman rite available in many languages to anyone with an internet connection; gregobase from the gregorio project contains almost the entirety of all the major chantbooks; and Benjamin Bloomfield’s psalm tone tool (or pslm) can point psalms for chanting.
The only problem with these and many other excellent projects is that they are generally written for programmers, by programmers, or as standalone applications for a specific purpose. Divinumofficium has errors in it, but correcting them requires understanding its (rather elegant) adhoc database structure, and not being intimidated by the words like ‘pull request’.1 Gregobase has everything, but it is not possible to search or retrieve scores programmatically.2 Bloomfield’s work is excellent, but if you’re making a booklet you still have to put everything together by hand.
OfficiumDivinum aims to be the missing glue to hold everything together.
- Lots of people are very knowledgeable about Liturgy, but can’t write code.
- Lots of people are very good at writing modern web apps, but not so at home with the interactions of TeX, fonts and a music typography layer built on top of TeX (not to mention whole websites written in perl, like divinumofficium).
- Lots of other people are very good at writing web APIs and standalone code, but not so good at writing frontend stuff like web apps.
On the other hand
- Everyone can use a point-and-click WYSIWYG app
Thus we offer:
- A complete re-write of the logic from divinumofficium as a fully documented OpenAPI compliant backend api (WIP)
- An example web app for the divine office written in Vue.js, which will ultimately have WYSIWYG editing. (TODO)
- A set of parsers for divinumofficium’s source files, which drop out nice python objects you can use directly in your own code.
- Documentation for the divinumofficium database structure, which is hopefully easier to read than the perl. (TODO)
- A booklet generator integrated with the office, to make singing any office together easy. (WIP)
- Tools for standardising gregorian scores, so that booklets display in a standardised fashion. (TODO)
- Testsuites and documentation for everything.