Re: Vertically centering a song text.

[David Wright]

On Thu 03 Dec 2015 at 07:32:44 (+0100), David Kastrup wrote:
> tisimst <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > \skip in the Lyrics context is necessary for skipping beats without
> > creating a melisma (which can be manually created with a single underscore
> > for each beat in the melisma). I'm not sure why it's insensitive to the
> > number after it. I have wondered the same thing, but that's the way it
> > works at the moment.
> 
> Because the whole point of \addlyrics/\lyricsto is to ignore durations
> and instead take items one-by-one irrespective of their length?

Agreed. For that reason, I would avoid using \skip 8 for the purpose
described; it's confusing to add wrong information into your LP source.

My workaround used to be to define an invisibledot as
\lyricmode { \once \override LyricText.font-size = #-19 "." }
for the first "syllable" followed by _ _ _ (less typing).

When I discovered that NBSP is treated like any other character,
I switched to using \nbsp (also followed by _ _ _) where
nbsp = \markup \char ##x00A0

So we end up in the example with:

nbsp = \markup \char ##x00A0
skipFour = \repeat unfold 4 \lyricmode { \nbsp }

or even

skipFour = \lyricmode { \nbsp _ _ _ }

(Just in case it's not obvious, you can't start your blanked-out
lyrics with _ because it will make LP try to do "extender processing"
on the previous syllable.)

> > Outside the Lyrics context in normal note entry, it is sensitive to
> > the number.

On which basis, I'd also criticise it because, at the point of definition,

skipFour = \repeat unfold 4 { \skip 8 }

does *not* indicate that it's only going to be used in a Lyrics context,
so the "8" *appears* to have an unwarranted significance at this time.

> You can write Lyrics perfectly well without \addlyrics/\lyricsto and
> durations both of syllables and skips and other musical material will be
> heeded.

... which AFAIK is the only way to handle folding/unfolding of
Lyrics repeats.

Cheers,
David.