### 3.15 Ancient notation

Support for ancient notation includes features for mensural notation and Gregorian Chant notation. There is also limited support for figured bass notation.

Many graphical objects provide a `style` property, see Ancient note heads, Ancient accidentals, Ancient rests, Ancient clefs, Ancient flags and Ancient time signatures. By manipulating such a grob property, the typographical appearance of the affected graphical objects can be accommodated for a specific notation flavor without need for introducing any new notational concept.

Other aspects of ancient notation can not that easily be expressed as in terms of just changing a style property of a graphical object. Therefore, some notational concepts are introduced specifically for ancient notation, see Custodes, Divisiones, Ligatures, and Figured bass.

If this all is way too much of documentation for you, and you just want to dive into typesetting without worrying too much about the details on how to customize a context, you may have a look at the predefined contexts (see Vaticana style contexts). Use them to set up predefined style-specific voice and staff contexts, and directly go ahead with the note entry.

##### Bugs

Ligatures need special spacing that has not yet been implemented. As a result, there is too much space between ligatures most of the time, and line breaking often is unsatisfactory. Also, lyrics do not correctly align with ligatures.

Accidentals must not be printed within a ligature, but instead need to be collected and printed in front of it.

Augmentum dots within ligatures are not handled correctly.

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