Visual Liturgy Blog

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.

The Visual Liturgy search browser lets you tag items like hymns and readings. These tagged items become a “short list”, for use in whatever way you want. Examples would be candidates for a hymn or carol service, or reading suggestions for a special service. The latest update also lets you export this list to a file.

To get started, open the search browser, for example by clicking the Browser button in the toolbar. Perform a search, then click on an item you want to tag so it is highlighted. Now press the spacebar to tag the item, or to untag an existing tagged item. Tagged items are shown with a tick symbol.

At any time, you can view your list of tagged items. To do so, click the Short list tab underneath the list. You can then either print the short list, or with the latest update, save it to a file. In either case, you first click the Print button. This opens the short list in a read-only window. You can set a title for the list, and show a second column of details if required.

When the list is as you want it, click Print… to open the print dialog, or Export to open a file save dialog. The default name for the list is itemlist.txt, and the default location is your My Documents folder (or just Documents on Windows Vista).

The exported file is plain text, which means you can import it into any other application that handles text. If you double-click the file, it will usually open in Notepad, where you can easily further edit the list, or copy it to the clipboard. Most word processors also have an Insert Text feature which lets you include the list in an existing document. In Word, hold down Alt and press I, then L to open the Insert File dialog, or use the toolbar.

If you have further suggestions for improving Visual Liturgy, please let us know.

We have posted an update to Visual Liturgy Live to address a change in the lectionary for Epiphany 2008. You can find more information about the change here:

http://www.transformingworship.org.uk/TransformingWorship/?page_id=108

In summary, in 2008 the readings (but not the Collect) for the Second Sunday of Epiphany are used on the Third Sunday (20th Jan), and those for the Third Sunday on the Fourth Sunday (27th Jan).

If you download the Visual Liturgy Live content module (Help – Online Update) this will update the calendar in Visual Liturgy so you get the correct readings. This will not change readings in planned services, so if you have planned services for those dates you should either discard them, or manually replace the readings with the correct ones.

We have also posted an update to the Visual Liturgy Live application. The changes are not major, but include the ability to export a tagged list to a file. This is likely to be the subject of a further post here.

For comments and questions, it is best to use the Visual Liturgy Live forum at:

http://www.visualliturgylive.net/FORUM/

Once you have upgraded to a team subscription you need to generate a licence code for each team member to enable members of your team to be registered users.
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If you are running Visual Liturgy Live, please use Help – Online Update to download and install the latest version. There are three updates available:

1. Software update. Fixes several minor problems which have been reported.

2. Help update. Help is still under construction, but this update improves on the build which shipped on the CD.

3. Content update. Times and Seasons material is easier to find and a couple of templates have been added.

Please watch for more updates in due course. By default, Visual Liturgy will check for updates on a weekly basis.

Tip: before installing the software update, close the VL Agent (right-click the VL icon at bottom right of your screen and choose Exit). This avoids the need to restart Windows after running setup.