Visual Liturgy Blog

Please use online update to get calendar updates for Common Worship

Please use online update to get calendar updates for Common Worship and Book of Common Prayer

We have posted a new update for Daily Prayer 2022 and Sundays 2023, please use online update to get the refreshed calendar.

UPDATE Jan 2022: The new calendar for 2022 Daily Prayer and 2023  Sundays  has been posted, please use Online Update now.

We work hard to keep the Visual Liturgy calendar up to date – why might you find it empty?

If the calendar does not show the Christian year events, then Visual Liturgy will not be able to select the correct readings, collects and other proper texts for services.

This is almost always caused by a problem with the Visual Liturgy login. Either the subscription has expired, or the username, password or serial number is wrong, or there is some issue on our server that is preventing the login from working correctly.

You can find out the status of your subscription by choosing Subscription Status from the Help menu in the top bar. The words you want to see are “Online update reports Active subscription”. If it says anything else, you will not be able to update the calendar. If the subscription has expired, there is a link to renew. If there is some other problem, and the subscription is in fact current, contact support and we will work with you to fix the issue.

October 25th is the Last Sunday after Trinity and is also an opportunity to celebrate Bible Sunday. A separate set of readings and prayers is provided in Visual Liturgy for Bible Sunday, but this year is not linked to the date, our apologies.

You can find these readings as follows:

1. Start a service in Visual Liturgy in the normal way, selecting 25th October.

2. In the date selection dialog, click Special Event

3. In the special event dialog, uncheck Show special events only

4. In the Search box, type Bible. Seleect Bible Sunday Year A in the list that appears and click Select.

We hope this is helpful, and you will be glad to know that Bible Sunday is correctly linked as an option for October 2021.

Visual Liturgy uses style sheets to format services. You can easily change the size of the font. The stylesheet used for most Common Worship services is called vhHTML.css but you do not need to open it directly. To change the font:

1. Open Visual Liturgy and choose Styles from the Edit menu in the top bar.

2. In the Styles editor, make sure the stylesheet selected is vlHTML.css.

3. Then drop-down the list called Style name and choose p.

4. Next, drop-down the Size list and choose the size you want. In the illustration I have choosen 18pt which is a large font size.

5. Click Save to save the stylesheet.

One caveat: it is possible that an update might overwrite your amended stylesheet with our default. If so, you can repeat the above steps. You could also set services to you use your custom stylesheet which is never overwritten but that is a bit more work so we suggest the steps as above.

If you want to change the font used, select the body style and change it there. Do not set a size for the body style though. Always change the size by editing the p style.

The Fifth Sunday before Lent (Feb 3rd) is unusual this year in that, because the 6th January is a Sunday, it uses the readings from the 4th Sunday after Epiphany.

In Visual Liturgy there is an option on Feb 3rd to use the proper readings and collects for the Presentation of Christ, or for the Fifth Sunday before Lent. If you choose to use those for the Fifth Sunday before Lent, you should download an update to the calendar (Online Update in the Edit menu in the top bar) in order to get these readings.

We have published an updated lectionary calendar for 2019 and 2020. To obtain the update, use the Online Update menu option, on the Edit menu in the top bar. Make sure you click on the calendar update so it is ticked, then click OK to install.