Re: Questions on _'s in lyrics (fwd)

[Mats Bengtsson]

> The documentation (and code) currently indicate that all _'s in
> unquoted lyrics are converted to spaces.  Although I can live with
> this, is there a good reason for this? I propose that if the _ is
> proceeded by a \ that it then not be converted to a space. This change
> would seem more natural to me and follow standard escape conventions.

Absolutely!

> The second matter is a proposed fix for spacing lyrics containing a \_. 
> In Box Font_metric::text_dimension any character sequence starting with
> a \ up to either {, }, space, or the end of string is ignored in
> computing the length of the string. If \_ counted the length of the
> _ and subsequent characters, would there be any issues? Also should this
> function include any other character proceeded by a \ in calculating
> the length of the string.

The idea was that, for example, \"{a} or \underline{word} should
get the correct size. Of course, the size of other commands, like 
\LaTeX, will not get the size but I thinks it's better to underestimate
than to overestimate since you could always add a few spaces at the
end of the syllable if you get a collision. 
Please go ahead and implement anything that gives a reasonable 
result. 

      /Mats