Best way to handle dialog / long text to fit the music?

Dorico
1

I have situation in which I need to write dialog lines that should be spoken with free time (i.e. not lyrics). Here’s an example:
image
I’m having a hard time aligning those properly, as it doesn’t seem like Dorico is trying to fill in the layout in a way the gives these space.

I tried two approaches:

  1. Using the lyrics tool on one note (technically a break) with spaces - this doesn’t really give more space for the music, and the sentence is centered in the middle of the note.
  2. Using the text tool - same problem, only I have more manual control over alignment.

I read this post Text cues and dialogue from which I understand that there is basically no standardized way to do it.

What is the best workaround to be able to work with this? So far it’s not only uncomfortable but also looks pretty bad.

2

Dorico won’t make space for these kinds of spoken texts automatically, so you’ll need to do a certain amount of manual adjustment if you need to make more space for them.

3

(If over the barline between bars 8-9, you intend the lyrics to be “come on”, you might want to double-check what you’ve entered here.)