I am having a problem with lyrics in page view in Write and Engrave mode with music imported from Finale via mxl files. What is happening is that there seem to be two copies of many of the lyrics, one on top of the other, but not quite aligned. (See the attached screen shot.) What worries me is that all of the lyrics might be duplicated like this but that doesn’t show when they are aligned–but will that remain true when I print the parts?
If I select and delete, both of the offset version of the same lyric are deleted, so the only solution I have found is to delete lyrics and type them back in. I’ve been working mostly in Galley view where the offset doesn’t show up so I didn’t notice that I still have a good number of these offset lyrics.
I don’t suppose there’s any way to fix this globally?
I’m now at the point where I am preparing a piano/vocal score for rehearsals of a musical so I’ve got to get this fixed. I still have two or three months to get it right.
If you select just the lyrics of a bar or two that show the overlap, copy and paste into a text editor, what do you get?
If they are doubled then you might want to go back to Finale and copy from the original lyric editor into a text file so that you have an easy to use version.
Otherwise you can ‘simply’ copy a bit, delete that bit so that the copied section is cleared, and re-input using the popover, pasting as you go. (Once a bunch of lyrics are in the clipboard, you can ctrl/cmd-v to enter each successive syllable.)
@Gregg_Butterfield that’s kind of what I expected to see. I have had doubled lyrics when shifting a notes position and entering the note again. Somehow the import has assigned the lyrics twice.
I don’t get any duplicate words when I paste into a text editor. My selection included some really bad offsets where I could clearly see that both were selected.
I used Finale’s verse, chorus, and section to organize lyrics amongst 15 characters in a musical with verse/chorus/section numbers ranging up to as high as 10 for some long complicated numbers. Note that I set the baselines to put them all at the same baseline. So that all gets pretty complicated.
But, this first song in the show only has one singer, and it still gets the double offset lyrics. Months ago I took a look inside an mxl file to see what I could see but didn’t come up with a way to deal with it from that end. Likely it’s some odd mistake in Finale’s mxl generation that Dorico can’t/doesn’t correct for. Dorico doesn’t pay any attention to the baseline setting apparently (if I remember right)–But that still leaves Dorico in some weird state where its saving two copies of a lyric on a single note with an offset between them that makes it noticeable.
On lyrics that are offset a lot, after multiple clicks to succeed in selecting just one of them, I can delete it and then see just one clear lyric. But that’s no solution for fixing lyrics in a whole musical. I’m just going to have to go through every song, deleting the screwed up lyrics and reentering them I guess.
No luck. At first I thought it was going to work but then I tried doing it on a whole line and it fixed one syllable but offset another one that was previously aligned.
As an experiment I selected a both copies of a syllable that has an offset copy then did a shift+L, deleted the lyric in the popover and reentered it. After hitting return, only one of the two copies was selected.
Then I selected a lyric before one with a duplicate offset, hit the right arrow to move to the lyric with the offset, and that selects only one of the copies of that offset lyric, so it can be deleted leaving the other copy in place. Still not a solution for fixing it globally though. It does allow me to select one of the two copies on syllables that are perfectly aligned, hit delete, and see that even the lyrics that look okay have a second lyric underneath them.
Here’s some progress. I noticed that there is a circle under a syllable when it is selected, and it is either on the left or right. If I turn on lyric text alignment and set it to Right, the offset goes away. If I set it to Left or Center, the offset remains.
I selected all the music in my first flow, filtered on lyrics and set lyric text alignment to right on all of them and I don’t see any offsets.
After I created a pdf I found that offsets I couldn’t see in Write or Engrave mode were showing up in the pdf. So, I looked through the whole piano/vocal score for the instances where it could be seen, cut the lyrics and pasted them into a text editor (BBEdit), then, for each staff, did a shift+L on the first note then a series of command+Vs to enter them back into the score. I had to repaste the lyrics for each staff.
Then I accidentally discovered something. I accidentally hit command+V (paste) before hitting shift+L after I selected the first note. The whole line of copied lyrics was pasted in all at once. Then I moved to the next staff and did it again and it worked! I didn’t have to recopy the lyrics like I did using shift+L.
So, it’s still some work to go in and fix these doubled lyrics with offsets, but this makes it a lot faster.
It gets better. I am working with a nine person chorus. They have enough differences in lyrics that I have a staff for each of them. So, when they all (or some) have the same lyrics and rhythms, I cut the lyrics, pasted them into a word processor then copied them in the work processor, selected the first note in the first staff and did a command+V (paste) and the lyrics were filled into all of the staffs. Dorico must have recognized that, with the rhythms all the same the same lyric belonged in all of them. That sped things up a LOT, not having to paste in each staff individually.
Now I just need to see that it fixes the problem of offset lyrics in the piano/vocal score, where there is condensing going on.
A forum message is turning up now asking if my question has been answered and to use the solution button if it has. Well, I would not call what I have done a solution. It is a work-around. A solution would be if Dorico could recognize these dual lyrics resulting from a Finale mxl import that are offset and fix them. Basically, what my method does now is to fix the obviously offset double lyrics, and how bad the problem is differs between write mode, engrave mode and saving a pdf. And, in the end, the pdf is what matters. So, for my method to guarantee no problems with the pdf, I’d have to go through and manually fix all of the lyrics in the entire project. What I have done is to fix the ones that are visible to me. That doesn’t guarantee that somewhere down the line these dual lyrics aren’t going to bite me. So, solution—no. Workaround, yes.
I can extract the first flow from an earlier version of my project. It has the problem and there is only one singer in it.
Something I might have done with Finale that is different from what others have done is that I used verse/chorus/section and their numbers to organize music between the fifteen singers and between different parts of the song. Then, as I have no repeats (it’s a musical), I set all of the baselines to be equivalent to the position of verse 1. Dorico didn’t seem to pay any attention to how I set the baselines. I did open up the mxl files to take a look at their contents but I’d have to go back again to refresh myself on what I found.
But, as it happens in a song with just one singer, and I never attached more than one lyric to a single note, ever, it is still baffling to me.
I will upload a file when I have time later today.
I have attached the project generated by exporting the first flow as well as the Finale generated mxl file that was imported into Dorico and an mxl of the project exported from Dorico. Note that throughout my entire project I have converted all lyrics to line 1 (at least I have attempted to given that Dorico doesn’t let me filter for line numbers greater than line 5). It can be seen from the attached files that Finale duplicates each lyric syllable and Dorico maintains that duplication.
You might try generating an mxl file from a Finale file with lyrics to see if it does that same duplication for you. If it doesn’t, then try using multiple verse/chorus/section numbers and setting the baselines to be equivalent to the vertical position of verse/chorus/section 1 to see if that makes a difference.
An example of the lyric doubling is in measure 44: the word “so”.
I have been experiencing this on a project I’m working on for a client. In my case, the duplicate lyrics seem to all be in a down-stem voice so if I select the staff and filter voices for all down-stem voices, this leav es the duplicate lyrics selected and easy to delete.
