Visual Liturgy Blog

We have a new downloadable install for Visual Liturgy Live, available to all users with a current subscription. It is ideal for installing Visual Liturgy Live for team members, or for when you are replacing your computer and need to re-install. The advantage of the download is that it already includes most updates, including the 2011 lectionary calendar, making the installation quicker and easier than using the CD.

You can find the download here:

http://www.onlyonline.co.uk/uploader/welcome.aspx

Log on with your subscription details. Save the setup file – do not choose “Run” if the web browser offers it. Then run setup from the file you saved.

The latest calendar update, posted today, extends the Daily Prayer readings in Visual Liturgy to the end of 2011. Sunday readings and other propers were already covered. You can obtain this update by choosing Online Update from the Edit menu in the top bar, provided you have an active subscription.

See also the earlier post Getting the lectionary calendar after 2010.

The lectional calendar on the Visual Liturgy CD only runs up to the end of this year, 2010. This is true of all versions of Visual Liturgy right back to version 3.0. So how can you keep Visual Liturgy running?

The answer is that an updated calendar can be downloaded. Unfortunately this is only available to users of Visual Liturgy Live with an active subscription. This means that users of Visual Liturgy 3.0 or 4.0 will have to upgrade to Visual Liturgy Live. If you have the Live version, the updated calendar has been available for some time so you may already have it – you can easily check by viewing the calendar for January 2011 or later.

Some users have experienced problems getting the calendar installed. In addition, our normal support person has been unwell for an extended period, so apologies to anyone who has had trouble getting help. We are dealing with any outstanding emails but it will take a few days to work through them all.

In the meantime, here is a troubleshooting guide.

1. Run Visual Liturgy on a machine that is connected to the internet , choose Online Update at the bottom of the Edit menu in the top bar.

 2. When the login dialog appears, enter your VL Live username and password and click OK. If you do not know your username and password, contact support with your serial number for advice.

 3. The online update dialog appears. At the top it should say:

Active Subscription. Your version is up-to-date.

If it does not say “Your version is up-to-date” there should be a software update listed. Install this, then re-run Visual Liturgy when it has completed and continue with this step 3.

If it does not say “Active Subscription” (other possibilities are Subscription Unknown or Expired) then you will not see the calendar update.

Subscription unknown normally means the wrong username/password was used to log in. You must also ensure that Visual Liturgy is registered, which you can do using the Registration option on the File menu in the top bar.

Subscription Expired means what it says. You can renew a subscription by logging in here:

http://www.visualliturgylive.net/index.aspx?id=1

at bottom left, and selecting Subscription details.

If it says “Active Subscription”, and updates are listed including the calendar update, then install the updates. I recommend installing them all, though only the software update (if present) and calendar update are essential.

If it says “Active Subscription” but no updates are listed then possibly the calendar update failed to install.  In this case, check the box that says “Show installed modules”.  The calendar update will now appear. Even if it says installed and up-to-date, click the grey tick-box to the left of the calendar update and when prompted click Yes to re-install. This will update the 2011 calendar.

4. If the above still does not work (it usually does) then from the Visual Liturgy File menu in the top bar, choose Compact Data. This performs some housekeeping on the Visual Liturgy database. When it completes, re-try online update as in step 3 above.

5. If none of the above works, contact support by emailing visualliturgy@hymnsam.co.uk, including your serial number and a description of the issue you are having.

We hope this helps you to keep Visual Liturgy fully up-to-date for 2011 and beyond.

The Book of Common Prayer (1662) is now available in Visual Liturgy Live
 
The development of Visual Liturgy over the last decade and more has been closely linked with the publication process for Common Worship. When we have asked users which content from other sources they would most like to see added to VL Live, the full text of The Book of Common Prayer is frequently top of the list.
 
We are delighted to announce that, with the kind permission of Cambridge University Press, the Crown’s Patentee, the full text of the Prayer Book (1662) is now available to Visual Liturgy Live users with an active subscription. You can download this material by using the Help/Online Update feature of Visual Liturgy Live.

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?

We have a guide here:

http://www.vislit.com/blog/?page_id=199

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.