Re: aligning melisma and non-melisma lyrics across staves in the same system

[David Wright]

On Wed 25 Nov 2015 at 12:01:44 (-0500), Kieren MacMillan wrote:

> I know there is a way to have accidentals “cross-canceled” between staves in 
> the same system.
> (I’ve used it… and it’s wonderful!)

I don't; what is it?

> Would it be similarly possible to have lyrics aligned between staves
> when one or more of the lyrics is melisma-attached (and is thus
> automatically left-aligned, according to the value of
> lyricMelismaAlignment) and one or more lyrics is not (and is thus
> centred, generally)? 

I don't like it myself. But do you mean doing this manually or
automatically? For the former, I just have
ll = \lyricmode { \once \override LyricText.self-alignment-X = #LEFT }
cc = \lyricmode { \once \override LyricText.self-alignment-X = #CENTER }
rr = \lyricmode { \once \override LyricText.self-alignment-X = #RIGHT }
defined and put \ll before such lyrics.

As for automatically, I can think of a couple of wishlist items that
would be far more useful to most people, and are related to this:

1) If there's a lyric extender on a lyric which is being attached to a
non-melisma note, ignore it. This would often save having four sets
of SATB lyrics differing only in each ones placement of extenders.

2) Given one set of lyrics and two or more voices of notes to attach
them to, left-align the lyric and don't ignore the extender (as in (1)
above) whenever any of the notes for that lyric has a melisma, and
extend the extender to the last melisma moment in any of the voices.

Currently I do (2) with NullVoice, but it's quite tedious manually
subdividing notes and adding ties to get the necessary effect.

Cheers,
David.