Re: Hyphenating words in lyrics across long repeats and across multiple pitches

[Simon Albrecht]

On 21.07.2016 12:16, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> So I guess that what you wrote me is because "Tra" would normally be
> centred on the musical note, but now that a hyphen is considered to be
> part of it, it gets wider, so the function shifts the note relative to
> lyrics for 0.4 units to the left to compensate.

That’s not quite how it works. self-alignment-X sets the reference point 
for alignment. 0 means the center of the grob’s visible extent, -1 left 
edge, 1 right edge, and you can choose any other value which will be 
placed on that scale.


> > > Another problem are cases which I would intuitively write
> > >       tra -- _ -- la
> > >
> > > where the first syllable "tra" would be sung across two pitches.
> > Simple: just omit the second hyphen. Hyphens will be extended to span the
> > whole distance until the next actual syllable comes. Same with extenders.
> Great, thank you.
>
> Could this be added to documentation, for example somewhere like
>
> http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/learning/aligning-lyrics-to-a-melody
> http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/notation/techniques-specific-to-lyrics
>
> It really took me quite some time to figure out how to:
> - hyphenate world (my initial attempt was a single '-' and perhaps
> even without spaces)
> - create an extended underline
> - skip notes (my initial attempt was an empty string: "")
> - create a "syllable" that contains space
> - the two problems mentioned above

Most of these are in fact discussed in the LM section, e.g. stating ‘As 
an alternative to using slurs, the melismata may be indicated in just 
the lyrics by using an underscore |_| for each note that should be 
included in the melisma’.

HTH, Simon