Visual Liturgy

Note: Our first release of Daily Prayer exposed a fault in Visual Liturgy which meant that year 1 Daily Eucharistic Lectionary readings appeared in year 2. We’ve posted updates to both Visual Liturgy and the calendar which fix this. If you have already downloaded them (before 16.00 on Friday 27th August) please use select Online Update from the Help menu in the top bar to re-download them. Apologies for the mix-up.

One of the improvements to VL Live most commonly requested by users has been the addition of links to the Common Worship Weekday Lectionary authorized in 2005.  We are pleased to announce that links to both this and to the Daily Eucharistic lectionary have now been made, so that the correct reference for each reading appears both in the Eucharist and in Daily Prayer. The present update provides these links through to the end of this year; later in the year another update will provide the correct links for 2011.  Adding the full text of the readings will be the next stage, and this is also expected soon.

So when you open Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer or Holy Communion and click on a weekday date all the correct readings will now appear. You will find that where a Festival has to be transferred to a weekday, from, for example, a Sunday in Advent, that transfer is made automatically. Where the transfer is optional, the readings and propers occur on the first date only, and if you want to transfer it to the second option you need to click on the red Festival title when you choose the date for the service. So for example the Blessed Virgin Mary, falls on a Sunday, August 15, so comes both there and on the Monday, as when it falls on a it may be transferred to the next available day. But, as it may also be transferred to September 8, it comes there as well, but if you want to transfer it you will need to click on it when you open the calendar.

As always, we love to be told when we’ve got it wrong (or could do it better), and as this is an unusually complicated bit of the programme there maybe the odd anomaly that has got through our rigorous testing operation, so let us know!

They Shall Grow Not Old: Liturgies for Remembrance is a unique liturgical resource that includes a wide range of greetings, biddings, sentences, opening prayers, confessions, intercessions, litanies, blessings and Bible readings printed in full, so that clergy and chaplains may create customized services of remembrance according to local need.

In addition it includes the full texts of the services of remembrance authorised or commended for use by the Church of England, the Church of Scotland and Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, and a selection of sample services for a variety of pastoral needs:

• A simple ceremony of remembrance
• A formal ceremony at a war memorial
• A service in church for Remembrance Sunday
• Remembrance within a Eucharistic rite
• A Veterans’ service
• A service of prayer for troops in danger
• A service of prayer for healing and strength.

‘They Shall Grow Not Old is a valuable resource for us as we come together on occasions to remember those who have died in war and acts of violence and terror. I commend it to all who will lead Ceremonies of Remembrance in these fragile times, and to all who believe that remembering the past has its place in the building of a better future.’
David Conner, Bishop to Her Majesty’s Forces

Users with an active subscription can download this material by using the Online Update feature of Visual Liturgy Live.

We’ve posted an update to Visual Liturgy Live including many small improvements. Some of them deserve a little more explanation, but for now here is a list of what’s new.

Images in VL content items

The display of images in VL content items was unreliable. This is now fixed. Note that you must use the .bmp format if you need to export to word processor formats.

Export templates

This is an option in the Visual Liturgy Export dialog. It lets you pour VL HTML content into a pre-existing HTML document. The field <VLBODY> in the external document is replaced with everything within (but not including) the <body> element in the VL service. The field <VLTITLE> is replaced with the title of the service.

Omit VL IDs

Visual Liturgy services include ID tags which identify VL service items. These are invisible when exported, but clutter the HTML. You can now choose to omit them by checking a box in the Export dialog.

Option to suppress “Unable to retrieve live news” warning

When VL is offline it prompts that it cannot retrieve live news. This dialog now has a “do not show again” option to suppress future warnings.

Open paths in Explorer

In the Edit – Preferences – Paths dialog you can open a path in Explorer by clicking the Explorer icon. Note this does not change the selected path. This is useful if you want to find the VL data but it is hidden in Windows Explorer.

Fix VLS import

The import of .vls services was broken in the previous build. This is now fixed.

Fix display of Saints on Earth in VL Agent

Saints on Earth biographies were not displaying in the VL Agent. This is now fixed.

Fix bug in VL Style Editor

In some scenarios the VL style editor could blank out settings made on the Advanced tab. This is now fixed.

Prevent duplicate entries in paragraph/inline styles

It was possible to have duplicate entries in the VL text editor, for paragraph or inline styles. This is now fixed. Further, changes made to these options in the style editor now take effect immediately in the text editor, no need to restart VL.

Saving services

If you use change a service name when saving, VL warns that it is renaming the template. VL was repeating the warning on subsequent saves. This is now fixed.

There were some cases where a service could change but not raise the save prompt on close. These have been fixed.

If you change the service name in the save dialog, and then click service properties, the name in service properties now reflects the changes you have made to the service name .

Pressing delete in service list

Pressing delete in the service list now deletes the selected item (after a prompt). Previously this required a right-click menu item.

Close VL Agent before update

VL Agent will close automatically before running setup for an update.

MDB size warning

VL will warn you if your database is beyond a certain size, and prompt you to compact it. The default size for a warning has now been increased to 300MB.

When you save a service in Visual Liturgy, it is saved by default to the services planner. This means you can start work on a service, save it, and then come back and finish it off or copy it to a word processor later.

The services planner organises services by location and service time. Visual Liturgy comes with a couple of examples, but if your church is neither St Barnabas nor St Jude what do you do?

The answer is to go to Edit – About my church and add a new location. There are actually two stages to this, which can be confusing. You can add a new church, and wonder why it does not appear when saving a service.

The reason is that that you need to define not only a location, but also a service time. A service time is a combination of a location and a time.

For example, let’s say you have one church, St Paul’s, with a service at 10.00am and 6.00pm. Open Edit – About my church, select Locations, and click New. Type St Paul’s in the dialog and click OK.

You are not done yet. Select Service times, and click New. In the dropdown, select St Paul’s. Next, type a time, which in this example is10.00am. If you prefer, you could just type Morning, or even Sunday – VL will not mind – but it could be confusing if you have more than one service at a particular church each Sunday. You can also add a description, though if you leave it blank VL will add one for you based on the service location and time.

Then repeat the process for 6.00pm.

This way, Visual Liturgy lets you manage multiple saved services without any uncertainty about what time and location each one is for.

Especially now that Windows 7 is out, many people are getting shiny new computers or laptops. But how do you move Visual Liturgy to a new computer without losing all your customised service templates or added items?

The procedure is as follows:

1. On the old computer, run Visual Liturgy. From the File menu, choose Backup.

2. In the backup dialog, uncheck the option to compress the backup. For the backup location, choose a location that you can find easily, and transfer to the new computer. For example, you could backup to a USB flash drive. Click OK to perform the backup. Exit Visual Liturgy.

3. On the new computer, install Visual Liturgy. Use online update to get the latest version of the software – don’t worry about the content at this point. Even if it is not registered, you can update the software – just hit OK (not Cancel) when prompted for username/password.

4. Run Visual Liturgy and look at Edit – Preferences – Paths. Note the location for Data Files. This is where you will need to copy the backed-up data. Usually it is

C:\ProgramData\Visual Liturgy 5

on Windows 7 and Vista; and

c:\documents and settings\all users\application data\Visual Liturgy 5

on Windows XP. See tips at the bottom of this post if you have trouble finding it.

5. Copy the backup data into the new location. When you do so, make sure you are overwriting what is already there – don’t copy it as a sub-folder. The backup is stored in folders, so you will need to open these to copy the files correctly.

6. Start Visual Liturgy. All going well, your old data will be restored and you can register on the new machine. Use the same username, password and serial no. as before.

Tips:

1. Windows will likely hide the data location in explorer. You can view a hidden folder like this by typing the complete location into the explorer address bar. Another possibility is to set the options to view hidden files and folders temporarily in Explorer options.

2. If you prefer not to overwrite the existing files, you can copy the backed-up files elsewhere on your PC and use File – Change Database to switch to it. This can get confusing though; it’s better to have just one database unless you specifically want to make use of more than one.

3. It is not essential to use the backup feature – you can just copy the existing data. But it may be easier to use backup since it saves you having to find the folder on your old PC.

4. If you don’t have any customised templates or added texts, there’s no need to follow the above procedure. Just install Visual Liturgy on the new computer with the same serial number, username and password as before. I recommend updating the software though before registering, as the version on the CD is quite old now.

We are considering adding a Restore menu item to Visual Liturgy, in order to simplify this.

You may have noticed a recent update to the Visual Liturgy Live software, and wonder what are the improvements? Here is what has changed.

Lectionary planner export

First, in response to requests, we’ve added the ability to export the lectionary planner to a spreadsheet format. To use this, run VL Live and choose Lectionary Planning from the sidebar. When the plan opens, choose Export from the Planner menu. In the Save as type dropdown, choose Spreadsheet (csv). This creates a document you can open in a spreadsheet program such as Excel. We’ve also improved the plain text export, which was badly formatted before.

Style support

Second, we improved the style editor in Visual Liturgy Live. This is an advanced feature, but a powerful one. All the text in Visual Liturgy is formatted using HTML and CSS. The style editor lets you change the way CSS styles are formatted, letting you alter the appearance of services. The text editor, available when you edit text details, lets you apply styles to the text of a Visual Liturgy item.

Previously the styles available in the text editor were fixed, but you can now easily control which styles appear in the drop-down menus in the text editor. VL has two types of styles, paragraph styles and inline styles. Some styles appear in the Paragraph drop-down, some in the Inline drop-down, and some in both. Further, some styles appear in neither drop-down.  

VL now allows the styles that appear here to be controlled in the Styles editor. Open this by choosing Edit – Styles. Make sure you are editing the right stylesheet – by default this is vlHtml.css. Select the Advanced tab. Select the style you want to edit in the Style name drop-down. Note the two new checkboxes:

1. Show as paragraph style

2. Show as inline style

Check Show as paragraph style if you want the style to appear in the text details editor as a paragraph style. Check Show as inline style if you want the style to appear in the text details editor as an inline style. No changes are permanent until you click Save.

Support for capitalisation

VL now supports text-transform as a style attribute. To use this, open the style editor. Create a new style, for example .vlcaps (this will be standard in vlHTML.css in due course. Note the leading point.). With that style selected, click the Advanced tab. In the new Caps drop-down, select uppercase. The preview will show the sample text in upper case. Also check Show as inline style.

If you now open a text in the text details editor, you will see vlcaps listed in the inline style drop-down. To apply it, select some text and choose vlcaps from the inline style drop-down. The text will be changed to upper case.

The advantage of this approach is that you can achieve an effect like this:

I BELIEVE in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth

without hard-coding the capitalisation in the text. If you want to remove the upper case adornment, all you need to do is to edit the stylesheet and modify the vlcaps style attribute.

The RTF export has also been amended so that upper case transform is supported, for example when you use Open in Word Processor. However, the other options in the new Caps style attribute are not currently supported, because there is no direct equivalent in RTF.

Importing VL3 texts

You may find some improvement in importing VL3 texts or modules, as this had regressed in previous builds. If you have the Canterbury Press module of hymns and worship songs, you can now import this using File – Import module. For best results, copy the module from the CD to your hard drive first, otherwise the tune index will not be imported.

It’s Lent, and many clergy are already looking ahead and planning services for Holy Week. One question that’s often asked on the VL forum is ‘Where can I find the dramatized versions of the Passion narratives in all four Gospels?’

Those of you with long liturgical memories will recall that Lent, Holy Week, Easter contained the dramatized Passion narratives, from the RSV, and that they were included in early versions of Visual Liturgy. But with the publication of Common Worship, the dramatized Passion narratives disappeared for a while. In 2007, Church House Publishing published Proclaiming the Passion, a booklet containing all four Passion narratives in dramatized form, from the NRSV. Immediately the cry went up from VL users, ‘Where can I find this in VL?’ For some time, it wasn’t available, but last year the VL versions were finally released.

So – assuming that you have a current VL Live subscription and have downloaded all the available updates – where can you find the dramatized Passion narratives within VL?

1. On the Home screen, click on the Create service tab.
2. As you scroll down the list of folders, you will come to one headed Proclaiming the Passion. Click on this and you will see a service template also headed Proclaiming the Passion.  
3. Double click on this template and the new service options dialogue box will appear. You will see that the service is defined as an undated service, so all you need to do is click on OK and the service template will open.
4. Within the template you will find everything that is contained in the printed booklet, including the introduction and notes on using the dramatized narratives.
5. You can then extract a passion narrative into a separate service, or cut and paste the text into a WP document.

We hope this helps you to use this resource. If you have questions or comments about these dramatized narratives, please feel free to use the Visual Liturgy Live forum.

A dedicated Help Desk facility exists to help Visual Liturgy Live subscribers with installation, registration, and technical support questions. Customers with an up-to-date Visual Liturgy Live subscription can contact our Help Desk facility between 09:00 and 17:00 Mondays to Fridays other than Bank Holidays. The Help Desk can be reached by dialing 020 7898 1451 and selecting the option “For help with Visual Liturgy….” Please have your Visual Liturgy Live serial number available. Please note that you can renew your subscription at any time online at http://www.visualliturgylive.net/ .

We would like to remind customers that this service was established for the benefit of those with an active subscription. From 1 February 2010, customers who do not have an active subscription will no longer be able to call on assistance from the Help Desk. Those without active subscriptions will be able to use the support area of the Visual Liturgy web site and the discussion forums in order to seek help.

If you have a Visual Liturgy Live content query please contact us via e-mail: visualliturgy@hymnsam.co.uk

For information about how to renew your subscription, upgrade from an earlier version of Visual Liturgy, team licensing and many other helpful tips including help with registration please visit our web site at http://www.visualliturgylive.net/.

Thank you for using Visual Liturgy Live.

The Visual Liturgy Team

We are pleased to announce that all of the remaining liturgical content of CW Times and Seasons in now available in Visual Liturgy Live. Users with an active subscription can download this material by using the Online Update feature of Visual Liturgy Live. You can renew your subscription at any time online at www.visualliturgylive.net.

Thank you for using Visual Liturgy Live.

We wish all our users a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The Visual Liturgy Team

A dedicated Help-desk facility exists to help customers with installation, registration, and technical support questions. The Help-desk is manned by 3 support technicians who are available between 09:00 and 17:00 Mondays-Fridays other than bank holidays. The Help-desk can be reached by dialing 020 7898 1451 and selecting the option “For help with Visual Liturgy….” The Help-desk team have become proficient at dealing with all of the common difficulties experienced by VL Live customers and are best-place to help in the first instance.