Extender Lines in only some lyrics/styles

I see a number of discussion about Lyric Extender lines, removing them, etc. but the solution always seems to be to turn them off globally by setting an outrageous minimum spacing amount before they appear. But this ends up affecting all lyrics.

When making Roman numeral analysis, all the advice around is to use the MusAnalysis font and disable all lyric extensions with the hack above. That works fine until needing to have Roman numeral analysis on a score with lyrics. Here Finale was awkward but had zero problems eventually getting the correct result: either disable them by default and add them back to the Lyrics staff where needed, or leave them in but manually delete them where they appeared in Roman numerals where they looked terrible.

Some way to make individual adjustments on lyrics lines would be extremely valuable. It also will help with the task of recreating old-score facsimiles where the original usage does not have the type of systematic behavior that Dorico espouses. Thank you.

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You can adjust the length of an extension line in Engrave mode. If you drag the line until it is less than the minimum threshold, it will disappear. You can also set the “Line End X” value to any sufficiently large negative number.

Being able to “delete” the line in Engrave mode would run contrary to the design of not being able to delete things in Engrave mode; though perhaps a “Hide” attribute would be good. I also agree that an easier way of creating lines where they don’t exist is needed.

I can only hope that in 100 years, people don’t feel there’s any merit in trying to exactly replicate some of the terrible scores on CPDL (and MuseScore .com for that matter). :rofl:

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Some things I’ve discovered doing hymn lyrics might work. When you don’t want an extension, there are two ways of doing it. Use the right arrow instead of pressing the space bar or press escape before pressing the space bar then start lyrics entry at the next spot. This avoids extenders on melismas. If you don’t want extenders on tied notes, break the tie so you have two separate notes then put the lyric on the first note. Then tie the notes.

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And if you should need syllables left-aligned without an extender, that can be done in Properties.

Actually, better to set alignment globally in Engraving Options>Lyrics.