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Re: Multiple stanza lines under second section of music


From: David Wright
Subject: Re: Multiple stanza lines under second section of music
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2016 19:32:10 -0500
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15)

On Mon, 28 Mar 2016 18:53:13 +0100, Richard Shann wrote:
> On Mon, 2016-03-28 at 19:30 +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
> > Henry Law <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> > > 3. On 28/03/16 13:05, Christoph Friedrich wrote:
> > >> refrain-empty = \lyricmode {
> > >> " " " " " " " " " " " "
> > >>   }
> > >
> > > (Blush) no it isn't.  I'd used underscores, which seemed to work.
> > > Yes, I know not to do that now.
> >
> > Why?  I think that's what the underscores are actually for.
>
> There is a comment in the docs saying that underscores are for melisma
> and that \skip is good otherwise. This came up recently in the denemo
> list, I put in a command to take a selection of notes and create a \skip
> for the appropriate number of syllables, as the only thing I could
> suggest otherwise was melisma.

If underscores are used for skipping notes, there is one problem to
be aware of: the first underscore causes the previous syllable to be
treated as the start of a melisma, moving it from centre- to left-aligned.

Because I prefer _ to \skip1 on several counts †, I'm careful to
replace the first underscore (which is sufficient to break the melisma)
with something else. I used to write
 invisibledot = \lyricmode { \once \override LyricText.font-size = #-19 "." }
but I now use
 · = \markup \char ##x00A0
where that centred dot could be almost any convenient character.

† more typing; weird durations; putting extraneous letters and
digits amongst the lyrics, confusing the eye; the syntax highlighter
colouring them so they stand out even more.

Spaces, ie " ", are treated exactly like underscores, but are
error-prone and confuse the eye when several occur together.

Cheers,
David.

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