I have a score in which I’m using the elision slur (underscore) at the end of a word in French to indicate a liaison between that word and the next, as in the image:
Problem is, when I opened this file, all my elision slurs had disappeared, and I could only make them reappear by adding a hard space after the underscore. I had to change each one individually, as editing via the “edit line of lyrics” dialog couldn’t seem to understand that anything was changing when I replaced all the underscores with the underscore+hard space pair.
Leaving aside for the moment whether using elision slurs in this way is a good idea or not, why would the behaviour of the underscore character change? Dorico had previously been quite happy to render an elision slur on encountering it, wherever it was placed in the lyric string. Did this behaviour change as a result of some considered work on lyrics, or was it a regression, or an unintended consequence of other changes?
Are you referring to a fairly old version of Dorico? As for me (I arrived two years ago, on Dorico 5), I think the underscore used to create an elision slur only works to link two syllables on the same note, so it doesn’t work at the end of a lyric (except with the workaround you mentioned, with a non-breaking space after it, or by entering the ‿ character).
It’s certainly possible that this behaviour has changed, but I can say that it wasn’t intentional that Dorico should render an elision slur at the end of a lyric. As you’ve found, the elision slur draws at a fixed, small size, and doesn’t really communicate the kind of legato singing you are trying to indicate. It would be nice if Dorico could create stretchy slurs between consecutive lyrics on demand, but little elision slurs designed to join words within the same lyric aren’t the right way to go about it.
I also seem to remember that at some point you could add an “actual” underscore using the Edit Single Lyric dialog, though that doesn’t happen in 6.2.30. (Though I dare say that some people didn’t want that.)
But the rendered elision slur is already the result of Dorico interpreting what is written in the lyrics popover, so dismissing the use of elision slurs in this case because they are the wrong tool seems unfair. In any case, I wasn’t interested in opinions on the approach, however much people may seem to be interested in find a better method – I merely wanted to know if this was a known regression (and hence likely to be fixed), or something else (and hence…an open question). I know that relying on non-standard behaviour is a great way to feed my hunger for disappointment.
It would be nice if there was a lyrics roadmap or something similar so that those of us who work around the niggling frustrations with lyrics daily could feel some faint hope that there is a path forward. I guess my question was kind of angling towards discovering that as a secondary goal, however oblique.
It is evidently a regression, though not a known one: showing an elision slur at the end of a lyric was not something that we explicitly supported, but changes we’ve made to the handling of lyric text in recent versions have prevented it from working. I will take a look and see if it’s a behaviour that can be safely restored without introducing other problems.
If you have other daily frustrations when working with lyrics, it’s helpful if you tell us what they are, as only then can we tell you whether or not those are known issues and/or things that we have plans to address.
