First off, how would you enter the word ‘inflection’ as a lyric - would it be ‘in-flec-tion’ or ‘in-flect-ion’? I’m guessing ‘in-flec-tion’?
Regardless, please see attached. The second syllable ‘flect’ has the ‘f’ and ‘l’ colliding. I did some searches and tried to use system text to create a syllable manually but interestingly, doing this also resulted in a ‘flect’ syllable with the ‘f’ and ‘l’ jammed together. This is shown below the actual lyric in the first image below. Is this expected, and is there anything I can do as a workaround? It’s not a huge deal but it’s bugging me.
The issue isn’t the spacing of the notes to which the lyrics are attached because I did a test with some notes that have lots of space between them and it looks the same (see image 2 below). It also doesn’t matter how I divide the syllables.
The “fl” being combined into one character is called a ligature. You can go into Library->Paragraph styles to edit the Lyrics style. Down at the very bottom is the OpenType features. Click the plus button and add Standard Ligatures. Then de-select the check box. I believe this feature was added in 6 and may not work with all fonts (as not all fonts have standard ligatures).
search the forum for “Flacademico.” This has come up before, and I made a version of the font that removes that ligature (which I feel is unsightly in this case). It’s another way to avoid the ligature permanently, though James is right that you can override the OpenType ligature function as well.
Ligatures between f and other letters are entire commonplace, and to be expected. They occur in almost every font. Some fonts have several combinations.
For more comfortable, and natural-looking lyric spacing, I recommend reducing some of the minimum horizontal gaps in Engraving Options > Lyrics. Especially around lyrics and hyphens.
