Musicus comments at
http://www.musicus.co.uk/blog — see the
Sibelius 7 thread (my WordPress login does not seem to work there, so I am posting here as it seems of interest to this forum too) — that the ICEL music in the Missal is very small (especially in the Study Edition, which has now arrived for those who ordered it), and seems to be blaming the publishers for using the ICEL-originated graphics.
The fact is that ICEL insisted that publishers use their graphics, in order to retain control over the printed output. Problems: (a) as noted, the ICEL graphics are not sufficiently legible; (b) they need cropping to be of any use at all; (c) they contain errors! (I'm not talking about the quirky way in which they have adapted clunky English to the Latin neumes, nor about the eccentric "blobby" style, but about actual typos). So, don't blame the publishers, blame ICEL.
Two American publishers have succeeded in circumventing ICEL's requirement, by re-engraving all the music — a huge task. Anyone who has tried to work with the ICEL music files will find that they have not used the Lyric tool for text underlay but the Expression tool for each phrase. Bizarre! Only an ignoramus could have espoused this
modus operandi. What it means in practice is that you cannot change the font of the text underlay at the simple click of a mouse, because the underlay is not created in the conventional fashion. One publisher re-engraved all the music in order to make the text underlay accord with the font they were using for the rest of the Missal text. Bravo, but what a huge labour of love! The other did this because the ICEL output simply looks weird. But ICEL has still tried hard to lean on both of them to get their output to look identical to ICEL's own...
Apologies for this technical stuff. Please now return to commenting on the rest of the Missal.
) I am happy to reveal my identity - Andrew Butler, Organist and DoM at St Andrew's, Tenterden, Kent, Archdiocese of Southwark. Non SSG member! (Pseudonym is a very long story!!)