Lyric move bug?

If I move lyrics to above the stave, dashes appear until the next line of lyrics.
These lyrics include hard spaces.
Is this a bug?

Hi Steve,
I’ve never seen this behavior — and I mainly deal with opera music… Can you post a picture? Are you sure you did not use the - key to navigate through those lyrics ? Arrows (neutral) or space (to advance and input the extend lines) are the right tools, but obviously you already know…

I’m wondering if these lyrics were entered immediately following lyrics below the stave, with space bar, rather than by selecting the first note above which you wanted a lyric and typing shift-L.

Every time you use a (regular) hyphen or space, you feed Dorico information about whether what you’ve typed is the start, middle or end of a word. Dorico makes informed decisions as to whether to expect further syllables based on this.

The likely fix is to select the final syllable of whichever line (wherever the dashes start) and fiddle with the start/middle/end property in the bottom panel. As so often seems to be the case, I’m not in front of Dorico just now, but I’m sure you’ll find the dropdown I’m describing!

Pianoleo, no the lyrics are in a bar on its own with a few empty bars before the next note.
Marc, the dashes appeared when I moved the lyrics from below to above.
These are lyrics I was being very careful about entry as they require hard spaces, and no dashes at all.
Easy to fix by going back into the lyrics and ending with a new space, but it feels like a bug.

Before/after pics.
All I’ve done is clicked ‘Above’ in the properties panel. Changing the above or below of subsequent lyrics doesn’t make a difference.
Lyric dashes Below.png
Lyrics dashes Above.png

Context please! Are there any lyrics before or after?

And what property is set for the “let us pray” lyric? It should be “whole word”, I believe.

Ah, that was it. It was set to ‘middle’. I don’t know why.
Thanks - I do like understanding things… :slight_smile: