Lyric clashing with bar through the system

How do I keep this clashing from happening? The centered lyric alignment is what I want, but I do need for them to be free of the barlines!

Us the chorus reduction grand staff rather than a keyboard grand staff.

1 Like

That is one approach, but I would rather have the line through the staff, and Dorico adjust the spacing properly.

@RLSimenson @sfiskum @dspreadbury Do you guys have a solution for this, by chance?

I donā€™t believe thereā€™s an automatic setting to avoid the barlines at this time, but as a time-saving option, in Engrave Mode you can shift-select all the collision syllables that occur to the right of a barline, and in the Properties Panel select LEFT for the Lyric text alignment, and also select an Offset value of about X = -1 (or try another negative number depending on your fontā€™s width), and this should move the left-most part of the selected syllables pretty close to the barline while still avoiding a collision. Itā€™s not a perfect fix, but at least it will allow you to tweak the placement of several problem syllables all at once. (I havenā€™t looked at whether a script might be used to automate the process)

Unfortunately, the other optionā€“ to keep the syllable perfectly centered, would involve moving the first note of the measure and each instance would be different, depending on the syllable length.

1 Like

Daniel, you might give the approach with the Choir (reduction) a second thought. In my opinion, even if syllables donā€™t collide with barlines, the lyrics still feel squashed into bar boxes. It somehow hinders to see the lyric text as an independent flow of words. Out of interest: Why do you prefer the barlines? Have you just got used to that look or does it meet a special demand?

Vocal lyrics should not use staves with connected bar lines, so there should be no collision between a lyric syllable and a bar line. Elaine Gould (ā€œBehind barsā€), page 439, says ā€œIf necessary the text may precede the barlineā€: so, stylistically, thereā€™s no reason to prevent lyrics passing under barlines.

1 Like

Yes, there is a particular reason Iā€™m preferring barlines. It is meant to be an ā€œeasy pianoā€ piece first (a la Hal Leonard), with lyrics being the less important factorā€¦

I donā€™t mean to pile in on your decisions, but ā€¦ the size of that font isnā€™t helping either. A serif typeface would be just as legible at a smaller size, leading to fewer crashes against the barlines.

Or you could set the Lyrics Paragraph Style to have a White background colour, which would ā€˜eraseā€™ the barline.

Otherwise, your only option is to manually add extra space before the first note for bars where this happens, in Engrave mode > Note Spacing.

2 Likes

Then it makes sense. In a way a layout that does not look right to a professional engraver might appear as easy approachable for the ā€œeasy pianistsā€. It does make sense.

Beautiful solution, Ric. Perfect, and not time consuming at all! Iā€™m writing that into our workflow :+1: