I would like to show a hyphen that connects a syllable at the end of a verse to one that’s at the start of the song. What’s the best way to do this? I tried it with a normal horizontal line, but that line is too long. Same problem with a syllable that needs to connect from before a repeat ending to the next repeat ending:
ALT + hyphen
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Thanks! Again, Alt+ saves my day.
Another question, should it also be used at the start of a repeat structure when the previous syllable starts elsewhere in a piece?
Is this an acceptable notation when a word’s last hyphen ends in a 2nd repeat structure? (last lyric line) This happens with a normal hyphen and an alt+ hyphen. It looks a little weird.
Yes, but the syllable should be centered with the others. Ignoring the hyphen.
I would say no. Don’t use a normal hyphen, just use a non-breaking hyphen at both ends.
Almost. That hyphen is too long to my eye… it looks like an em dash, which is different.
Also, you should add a non-breaking space between the syllable and the hyphen. Alt-Shift-Spacebar.
This is the hyphen I get when using Alt+ hyphen. I don’t see a way to use another hyphen-like line or making it shorter.
Try typing Alt-hyphen in a word processor or some other program. I bet Alt-hyphen on your OS is producing a different character. That’s just not a hyphen in your example above! You can see it’s definitely a different character than the breaking hyphens.
Here’s what it should look like, including a non-breaking space:
Dan, I can’t reproduce your example above in Dorico. When I copy Alt-hyphen from a word processor, I get exactly the same character when I input Alt-hyphen diretly in Dorico – which is longer than a normal hyphen.
Which font did you use in your example?
Thomas
[Edit] In Academico and Times New Roman Alt-hyphen is longer than the normal hyphen. In Minion Pro both are the same.
Aha. Yup, that’s it. I used Minion Pro.
This seems like a Dorico problem. Alt-hyphen should produce a non-breaking hyphen that uses the same character as the conventional hyphen. Unless this was intentional. But that is clearly an em dash!
Dear Doricians,
I already had that hyphen problem. It appears that Academico does not provide a proper hyphen when using alt+hyphen in lyrics popover. It works when copying pasting from an external editor. I use Linux Libertine font for my lyrics, and use U+2011 unicode glyph or U+002D as a hard hyphen. Hope it helps!
I found an excellent solution for faking a hyphen. I used the Emoji & Symbols utility in Mac OS to copy and paste a “SMALL EM DASH” (Academico font). It is in the Punctuation section of Emoji & Symbols. It works for lyrics at the end or beginning of a stave. I first copy the small em dash into a TextEdit document, then copy it into the Lyric popover. Try copying the syllable “as﹘” (shown below) into a Lyric popover:
as﹘
Character info:
SMALL EM DASH
Unicode: U+FE58, UTF-8: EF B9 98
P.S. The music shown by André van Haren in his initial post is from a collection of 18 Christmas songs in Spanish called “Cantos de Navidad”. André engraved them for me and Tony Moran (RIP) for distribution at insong.org.
If I may… I don’t think small em dash is an appropriate name, as there’s no such thing as a small em dash. An em-dash is strictly a dash that has the width of an M (hence the name), an en-dash has the width of an N (smaller).
Thinking about it, it might refer to the width of an m?
I still think U+2011 is the appropriate glyph to fake an hyphen when needed. And I would add a small unbreakable space before (U+202f)
Dorico 4’s provision of the Edit Single Lyric dialog makes this a non-issue, at least in my experience. Type the lyric without a hyphen, invoke Lyrics > Edit Single Lyric, and alter as you wish with a normal regular hyphen character.
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Edit Single Lyric dialog
Excellent! This handles everything except centering the syllables as Dan said in post #5.
FYI this is part of a set of Compatibility Small form variants for the Chinese Standard Interchange Code, CNS 11643, similar to the fullwidth and halfwidth forms of the alphabet in Japanese character sets, etc.
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Unfortunately, I am still using Dorico 3.5 on my mighty 2009 Mac Pro (High Sierra) so I do not have “Edit Single Lyric”. While I do have Dorico 4.2 installed on my 2016 MacBook Pro (Mojave), I do most of my engraving on my big 28" Dell monitor attached to the 2019 Mac Pro.
My solution “simply works”. I did not make up the name “small em dash”. I know what a normal em dash is. This is a half-width em dash that has space to the left and right. It perfectly emulates a regular hyphen in appearance. It is not stripped out when you enter it into the Lyric popover.
I rest my case.
Hi. I wasn’t implying you were doing any mistake at all, but was just surprised by that “new beast” to me. Thank you very much for the explanation (and the links), and I’m glad such an easy solution exists!
Edit: I tried U+FE58 and it works perfectly, as you said! Great piece of info, especially for those who are still under Dorico 3.5
Edit 2: I tried it on a Dorico file in the real context and I find there’s a problem with U+FE58 : the hyphen is too high from the baseline (at least with the font I use for lyrics) so I’ll stick with U+202f and U+2011 which give me the exact same result as regular hyphens produced by Dorico.