Re: lilypond-placement of lyrics

[Zoltan Selyem]

> Absolute beginner with music notation, I often have to enter unmetered music 
> in
> Lilypond. My problem is that a long phrase (Bénis_le_Seigneur_ô_mon_âme, for
> example) is often sung over the same note, breve or other in notation. Now,
> Lilypond centers the text bloc under the note; so, I have text outside the 
> page
> marges, left or right. 

> I tried to add "ghost-notes" (I mean, to distribute the same phrase over more
> than one note), and the situation improves. But it does not respect the 
> original
> score, that I have to copy, and the appearance of the final score is not
> completely satisfactory (the distribution of music and lyrics is rather
> irregular). Do you have other solutions? for example, in order every phrase to
> start exactly under the corresponding note, and not to be centered? Or other.

To left-align the note with the words you have to change the
self-alignment-X parameter of LyricText.

If the words are too close to each other you can increase
the distance between the syllables with the minimum-distance
parameter of LyricSpace.

For example:

%-------------------------------
\version "2.11.21"
\paper{ ragged-right=##t }
\relative a' {
  \time 4/2
  a\breve | g1 a
}
\addlyrics{
  \override LyricSpace #'minimum-distance = #3.0
  \override LyricText #'self-alignment-X = #LEFT
  Bénis_le_Seigneur_ô_mon_âme
  A -- men
}
%-------------------------------


Zoltán