Just a thought: what about allowing lyrics to be moved to different lines (that is, stanzas. Line 1, Line 2, etc.) using Alt-up/down? I could see this being really useful.
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I was pondering something similar the other day. We can navigate between lines of lyrics in engrave mode, but not write mode, and I found myself wondering why the other day. I instinctively tried to tab, to see if that would work, but it didn’t. Some méthode of changing lines of lyrics in write mode via the arrow keys would indeed be a welcome addition.
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That does sound cool and fits with their way of doing things! Maybe give the post a “feature request” tag?
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Great idea!
You can change the verse number in Properties with arrow keys (if that’s any help).
No; we are talking about navigating between lines of lyrics in write mode. Changing the verse number wouldn’t solve this particular request, and the ability to change verse numbers has been around since 1.0
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I’m a bit confused here; apart from the key command part, how is this not what @dan_kreider is asking for? (I realise that the shortkey is the core of Dan’s request; I just try to find out if I have a fundamental misunderstanding of what is asked.)
I think we are all on the same page but we just want a key command.
I believe you do.
I too am confused by the request. Moving a selection of lyrics from verse 1 to verse 3 is simply achieved by changing the lyric line number property. And if you want to swap part of verse1 to verse3, first move verse1 to an empty verse etc.
I understood it as you did, as @dan_kreider is also a long time dorico user and the suggested alt-arrows is usually used to move things, not to move between selected items. Surely both requests are reasonable.
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I’m sorry; I did misunderstand.
Upon a closer reading, I guess Dan meant that it would be nice to transfer a word up or down to another line via key commands.
I was thinking he meant that it would be nice if we could use alt-arrow to switch between the lines when navigating with arrows. As things currently stand, in write mode you can only left and right arrow between the words of any given line of lyrics, but then if you want to switch to a different line, you have to do so with the mouse.
Sorry to introduce confusion to the discussion here.
Incidentally, I am just now putting the finishing touches on a Lyrics library for ConsoleTools, similar to the one for Filters; one of its functions would at least make it possible to conveniently cycle lyrics through different lines via shortkey.
And since there should be some Lyrics power users in this thread: what’s your experience with the “Paragraph style” property? Do you use it more than occasionally? And if so, what would be typical use cases?
I use it fairly frequently to switch to a “compressed” lyric style with 98% horizontal stretch and -0.1 letter spacing if the line requires it.
A compressed style is the only occurences where I have used that Paragraph property too (and I really love it). Maybe I’ve been quite stronger than Dan on the horizontal stretch…
Quite useful especially in Recitativo (where obviously the bass notes are quite much longer than the singers’, so the text is basically what rules casting off).
It probably depends on the typeface. For Minion, I find that any more than 97% looks significantly squished.
I also use a 98% compression style for lyrics. (Truth be told, my preferred font is always scaled a half-size larger than normal, compressed to 98%, which gives me a slightly taller height but keeps the same horizontal footprint. Then I will compress even further if necessary. As Dan mentions, this can only go so far (96-7% depending on the negative letter spacing, in the case of my favorite font).
Sometimes I will have a separate translation font (wholly other font that is a different size and italicized) if the situation demands it.