Visual Liturgy

CHP has now announced its outline publishing programme for VL Live for 2008 and 2009, with the following key features:

• Year 1 subscriptions will all run until at least All Saints’ Day (Saturday 1st November) 2008.
• All VL Live users who bought and installed their copies of VL Live before 1st November 2007 will therefore have their subscriptions extended free-of-charge until 1st November 2008
• All VL Live users who bought and installed their copies of VL Live after 1st November will have their Year 1 subscriptions until 1 year after the date they registered their software.
• The publishing programme for Common Worship: Times and Seasons will be completed during Year 1, before 1st November 2008.

The Year 1 publishing programme will also include

• Some improvements and additions to Daily Prayer content and smart templates
• Some new seasonal and occasional templates

The future publishing programme, beginning with Year 2in November 2008, will include

• Further improvements and additions to Daily Prayer content and smart templates
• Common Worship: Festivals
• The Book of Common Prayer
• Common Worship: Ordination Services
• Proclaiming the Passion
• Continuing improvements to service templates
• Continuing provision of content to support daily prayer
• New service templates

Visual Liturgy Live subscriptions will be held at £52.00 per annum for year 2 and that price will be held until 2009.

Comments are not allowed here; but please feel free to discuss on the Visual Liturgy forum.

Church House Publishing (CHP) has a continuing programme of development for Visual Liturgy Live and we need your help. We’re looking  for people with a wide range of experience and expertise to assist with content development during 2008 and 2009. Our aim is to significantly improve and augment the content in Visual Liturgy, to enhance its role in planning and preparing worship for all occasions.

We’re planning a significant amount of editorial work for 2008-09 so that we can provide the following content for Visual Liturgy Live

• The entire Common Worship library
• The entire Book of Common Prayer
• The complete set of daily lections for the annual lectionaries
• New and improved service templates

Amongst the areas of Visual Liturgy in need of development are:

• Liturgical texts;
• Service Templates which need enhancing
• New Service Templates which need to be designed
• The lectionary
• The Psalter
• Themes
• Reading Plans

Some subject areas, such as Daily Prayer, will benefit from long-term maintenance as the service  templates evolve and the daily lectionary is compiled year-on-year, so we would like to hear from you if you were interested in taking responsibility for subjects such as Daily Prayer, or lectionaries.

What skills are we looking for?

Some related editorial work is also planned for other CHP publishing platforms such as websites, and Visual Liturgy has a future on the internet in some form, too. The skills required therefore range from

traditional editorial skills such as data-entry and proof-reading, to
technical skills such as the use of markup languages and web-presentation tools.

Above all we need  enthusiasm for and knowledge of liturgy, as Visual Liturgy is designed to bring liturgy to life in the service of the Church; training and technical support can always be provided if necessary.

Applicants should ideally have experience of worship-planning using Visual Liturgy (VL) or similar products, or be willing to learn Visual Liturgy skills. Training and support will be provided for all participants to improve their knowledge and skills relating to Visual Liturgy. Participation is encouraged from people with experience of and interest in a diversity of worship styles.

The Rewards

Your expenses will be fully reimbursed, and your work will be rewarded in various ways, ranging from participation in early-release programmes and a discount scheme operating in CHP’s online shop,  to professional rates of pay for editorial and technical work where appropriate.

What to do next

If you are interested in participating or assisting CHP in this programme of work, and you have something to offer no matter how much or how little, please email Church House Publishing’s New Media Manager andrew.sweeney@c-of-e.org.uk giving the following details:

• The skills you can offer
• Your experience of worship-planning using VL or equivalent applications
• The approximate amount of time you can offer and the basis on which you would like to be engaged (for example:
  - 20 hours per week on a professional basis
  - A few hours per month on a volunteer basis
  - Etc.)
• the preferred area of VL or content preparation in which you would like to participate (for example VL template improvement, or markup of new liturgical texts).

We plan for Visual Liturgy Live to have a long and successful life, so this announcement is not date-sensitive; whenever you see this announcement, please get in touch with CHP. We look forward to hearing from you.

Saints on Earth is a book edited by John K. Darch and Stuart K. Burns which was published in 2004. It includes a CD which installs into Visual Liturgy 4. When installed, a hyperlink to the biography appears on the Visual Liturgy welcome page on each Saint’s day, and you can right-click a Saint’s day in the calendar and view the biography.

Since Saints on Earth appeared when Visual Liturgy 4 was current, the installer does not work with VL Live. However, we have tweaked VL Live to support it properly. Please note that you need the Saints on Earth CD for this to work; it is not a standard feature of VL itself.

To use Saints on Earth, first update VL Live to the latest version using online update (a new update was posted today). You also need to install the latest content. Then run VL Live, and use File - Import module to navigate to the module on the Saints on Earth CD. Import the module, and the links will appear in VL Live. Once imported, you do not need to have the Saints on Earth CD in the drive to use it.

More details on Saints on Earth are here.

Someone enquired about changing the default print layout when printing a service. The default is 2-column (landscape), and the request was to change this to A4 Portrait.

It’s a good question because this is not very obvious. The first thing to say is that many users prefer to print from their word processor. VL makes it easy to do this. Right-click the text of a service and choose Open in Word Processor. You can make final edits as well as printing. You can change the word processor using the Edit - Preferences dialog.

However, you can change the order of the print layouts. These are actually files, and they are in alphabetical order, more or less.

You can amend these by opening the printtemplates folder and renaming them. The default location for the printtemplates folder is:

On Windows Vista:

C:\ProgramData\Visual Liturgy 5\printtemplates

On Windows XP:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Visual Liturgy 5\printtemplates

For example, if you rename the 2 Column (Landscape).html to:

1 2-column (Landscape).html

Then it will appear first in the list.

Here’s a quick tip for searching in Visual Liturgy. When you search using the Visual Liturgy browser, you can click the right-pointing arrows at top right to open an “advanced” panel that lets you restrict the search in various ways. However, there is also quick way to apply a filter, by starting your search with a special prefix. A prefix is one or two characters followed by a colon. Here are the available prefixes:

L: Liturgy only
P: Psalms and canticles only
A: Authors
R: Readings
T: Themes
SS: SongSelect
SC: Source
M: Music
S: Music
H: Music
C: Code
X: Full text (slow)
B: Biblical index

You do not need the Advanced panel open to use prefixes. For example, say you wanted to search for psalms or canticles with the word “joyful” in the first line. Type:

p:joyful

in the search box, and press Enter. Visual Liturgy lists matching items, such as Psalms 66 and 100 and the Phos Hilaron.

The Code search looks a bit mysterious. We’ll look at that in another tip.

First, very best wishes to all Visual Liturgy users for this Christmas Season.

Second, a tip relating to copying and pasting text. A user recently asked how to avoid excessive margins when copying text from Visual Liturgy to a word processor or DTP program.

There are several things you can do. I’m not suggesting you use all of these, but consider them as a set of tools that will enable you to get the best possible result.

First, have a look in Edit - Preferences - Services. Here you can enable or disable certain features of copied text, including Preserve Wide Margin. If your priority is just to get the unadorned text, try unchecking both Preserve Wide Margin and Include Styles in RTF

Second, you can amend this at the template level. Open the template you normally use and select the detail view. From the Service menu, choose Properties, then Styles. Drop down Detail view and select NoWideMargin.css for a service without the wide left margin

Third, you can amend this at the item level. Right-click a reading in the service list, and select Service Item Properties. Select Detail view, then Service Text. Check the option As Block Text to remove all indentation. NB I do not normally recommend this option as it may break important formatting, but it is there if you want to do all the formatting in your desktop publishing software.

If you amend the template, don’t forget to save it with File - Save - As a service template.