This week we had a discussion about the Visual Liturgy data format. One of the major changes between VL3 and VL4 was the move from Rich Text Format to HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for the text format. This gives users a lot of flexibility in how services are displayed. When VL 4.0 was first released you had to manually edit the CSS to take advantage of this, but that is no longer the case. If you go to the File menu and choose Styles, you can use a simple stylesheet editor built into Visual Liturgy.
It’s all very well editing a stylesheet, but there are several in VL’s stylesheet folder – which one actually gets used? Good question. The place to start is Edit – Preferences – Styles. Here you can see the preferred stylesheets for the current lectionary. In VL terms, a “lectionary” is not just a set of readings, but a whole set of liturgy as well; and typically each set of liturgy (such as Common Worship, or Methodist Worship) has its own stylesheet. In addition, individual services may have a stylesheet that overrides the lectionary default. When a service is open, you can see if this is the case by looking at Service – Service Properties – Styles. If it says “Use default stylesheet”, which most of them do, then it is the one in Preferences that gets used.
It’s easy to experiment safely with styles. It’s probably not a good idea to edit a standard stylesheet like vlHTML.css directly, at least, not without taking a backup first. Fortunately the Style editor has a Save As… option that lets you amend a stylesheet and save it under a different name. Then you can apply your amended stylesheet to an individual service, or make it the new default for the current lectionary, knowing that you can easily switch back to the standard item.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you use the NRSV bible, which has verse numbers in the text, but you would like the readings to appear without verse numbers. Choose Edit – Styles to open the stylesheet editor. From the Stylesheet menu, choose Save As…, and give the stylesheet a new name, such as MyStyles.css. Now drop down the Style name list and choose .vlversenumber. Drop down the Display list and set it to none. Then save the stylesheet, and close the editor.
Next, go to Edit – Preferences – Styles and drop down the list of styles for the Detail view. Choose mystyles.css from the list, and click OK. Next time you start a new service, it will use mystyles.css, and verse numbers will be hidden.
A couple more stylesheet tips: if you want to change the font used for the service, edit the body style. This is the only place where a font is specified in the standard stylesheets. If you want to change the size of the font, edit the font size for the p style. That will change the font size in most of the text.
In the forthcoming update to VL, we’re improving the text editor for Visual Liturgy items to make it easier to apply new styles which you design. Currently the list of styles in the text editor is fixed, but that will change.
If you come with an alternate stylesheet you find particularly useful, feel free to send it to us. We may be able to put it up for download so that others can benefit from it too.