RE: Adding line breaks within lyrics

[James Lowe]

Hello,
________________________________________
From: address@hidden address@hidden on behalf of Andrew C. Smith address@hidden
Sent: 18 June 2011 20:01
To: LilyPond User Group
Subject: Adding line breaks within lyrics

Hi everyone,

I'm writing a piece where the rhythms of the sung words are free, so a whole 
phrase is attached to a single note. I'm putting my lyrics in " " for each 
note, but they appear on one long line, when I actually want them wrapped to 
the width of the bar. Is there a way to add a line break within the quoted 
lyric, or to set the max width and tell lilypond to wrap the text?

\partI = \lyricmode {
...
\override LyricText #'font-shape = #'italic
\override LyricText #'self-alignment-X = #LEFT
"world's chaos when we seek it water's drifting as slowly out tides toward land 
twice daily"
...
}

later on,

<<
\voice
\new Lyrics \lyricsto "soprano" { \partI }
\violin
>>

Let me know if maybe there's a better way to do this. I'd like to keep it as 
clean as possible, and also to be able to keep all my lyrics in one variable in 
case I want to split up the file later. Thanks.

-------------------

I will start by saying that I have not done any setting using lyrics, so there 
may be others out there who know better.

However after a quick look in the internals reference '3.1.63 LyricText'

It might be possible to use the 'text (markup)' option   ( '#<procedure #f 
(grob)' )

Is one of the options in the Notation Reference  “Formatting text” ...

Scanning down you could perhaps use the '\wordwrap-string arg (string)' option?

I realise that probably isn't much help if you aren't comfortable with the 
syntax for overrides, and I am not competent enough to use set Lyrics to give 
you a 'quick and dirty' test, but it *might* be a way round this. Hopefully if 
this is a way to use it someone can come up with a valid syntax. What I am 
seeing though is that there would still need to be some 'arbitrary' line width 
that you'd need to put in - i.e. I cannot see a way to say 'line-wdith = length 
of measure' to create breaks easily.

But I hope this does help.

james