Difficult layout questions

[Dominic Neumann]

Hi LilyPond freaks,

at the moment I´m creating a songbook with 200 modern church songs in
it. As you can imagine I use LilyPond for this task (together with
LaTeX, but that´s not that interesting now).

Now I´ve got some layout issues I don´t know how to fix them. I post
this all in one thread, you can split it up when answering if it is
necessary.

1. The offset between the lyriclines is a bit too high. Is there an
easy way to reduce it?

2. I use the \set stanza = "1. " command within \lyricmode to set the
versnumber and to set the point where the refrain begins ("Refr. ").
When using the long string "Refr. " it sometimes sticks out of the
left boundary.
A similar problem occurs when typesetting longer syllables. Then the
sometimes stick out of the right boundary what looks quite ugly.

Maybe this already has been solved in a newer LilyPond version? By now
I´m using 2.10.29 on my linux production machine.

3. Sometimes the hyphen between syllables shrinks that much that it
looks like a dot. As this does not look good I´d like to define a
minimum length for such hyphens. Is this possible?

4. Is it at all possible to move particular syllables a bit to the
left or right?

That´s it for now. Maybe there will be other questions later on.

Thanks,

Dominic