Re: lilypond question (aligning lyrics)

[Erik Sandberg]

On Tuesday 07 January 2003 05.45, Jeff Ousley wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I'm trying to quickly come up to speed on lilypond and
> stumbling quite a bit. I'm putting together a music
> book for a group I'm in. In working on the first, very
> short song, I'm running into a problem with the
> lyrics. The song starts out with a quarter note pickup
> (\partial 4). So, the first measure has two 8th notes.
> There should be two words in the lyrics that align to
> these 8th notes, but it's not working. The first word
> seems to be aligning to the second note.

By default, lily uses the behaviour that if a group of notes are slurred or 
beamed, then only one syllable is aligned under that group of notes. You can 
turn this behaviour off by adding
\property Voice.automaticMelismata = ##f
in the beginning of the melody block.

IIRC this was in the documentation in 1.4.x (though the default behaviour was 
the opposite), but I can't find it in the current docs.

BTW, you do not need to set the explicit durations of the syllables, lily 
does that automagically. Durations are only useful when you have multiple 
stanzas, and then they only tell lily how the stanzas relate to each other.

Erik