Lyric requests

Dorico
1

  1. If I’m overwriting lyrics, the space bar gives me selected lyrics to overwrite.
    If I need to use a hyphen, the current lyric is unselected.
    Can these be the same.

  2. Ability to underline or italicise individual words or syllables.
    (This may be already be possible, but I can’t see how…)

2
  1. Try using the right arrow rather than a hyphen; the hyphen should remain in place but the next lyric will be selected.
  2. For italicising I often cheat by using the Chorus style for the odd word. When inputting via the popover tap the Up arrow and you should see the number in the left side of the popover change to a C (you may need to do this a couple of times), or if the word’s already in place there’s a “Chorus” property in the bottom panel of Write mode. I believe that text style is italicised by default, but if not you’ll need to nip into Engrave Mode, go to the Engrave menu and fiddle with font styles there. I don’t think there’s a solution for underlining, but I may be wrong!
3
  1. Often I’m replacing two words with two syllables of one word. I can’t think of a good reason why the hyphen should behave differently to the space.
  2. Yes, I’ve been using the chorus style, but would still like to request that these be added. They’re both quite common. The workaround at the moment is shift-x underlines, but this is fiddly as hell…
4

I agree with your requests, as a fellow user. I was merely trying to help with:

5

Thanks Pianoleo!

6

I agree with Steve, lyrics selected even after hyphen pressed would be great (when replacing lyrics).

7

I also hope that underline will be possible soon in Dorico. Underline or italicise individual words or syllables is something very common on chorales or a lot of sung music, and most of the score editors allow us to do it. Currently I have to edit the generated PDF to make these adjustments, this not the best workflow and it’s a bit time consuming.

8

You can already make individual lyrics italic, using the Italic property in the Lyrics group of the Properties panel. It’s available when lyrics are selected, both in Write mode and Engrave mode.

9

Thank you Lillie, yes I saw that option, I hope un underline option could be available as well.

And when I’m speaking about syllables, I mean to be able to underline any part of the text below a single note, not the whole text. In our copying project, we often have long sentences below a single double whole note, with part of the text (only a few letters) that could be underlined (to express an accent or an emphasis). This is something that was previously possible for us when we were using Finale (and even MuseScore).

10

If you’re sufficiently desperate and your Lyrics font has the correct characters, you might be able to do this. See Diacritics and other strange text - #12 by pianoleo - Dorico - Steinberg Forums

I’ve been known to switch the font in a PDF editor after the fact, which is generally quicker and less laborious (but I’ll have to do the work again if the project gets revised in future).

11

Font Styles do have an option for Underlining, so you could use Translation Lyrics, or Chorus (if you’re not using them for anything else), for the lyrics that you want underlined.

12

I’d like to tag that in addition to what is requested above, I’d also like the ability to select words in write or engrave mode and add accent/unaccent marks above them just like they’d apply to a notehead. I’ve used this tactic in psalm settings before (similar to the underlining request above to indicate where stresses should lie on long reciting tones) and in general people understand the notation immediately. Right now I have to switch to a PDF editor and add them all over that way because it’s too laborious in Dorico to fake it. Sometimes you can just use native accent characters on words that wouldn’t ordinarily úse them, however this doesn’t help when you need a mark over a consonant.

13

Thanks for the tips using diacritics! It’s very interesting when it’s supported by the font!
I tried different things including the “Combining Low Line” (U+0332), it works on different font families, but unfortunately not on the default Academio (the font we use), either on similar fonts that we also use. Now that we have a lot of work made with Dorico, it’s not easy to take the time to choose another font that looks similar, and update everything…

For the time being we will continue to edit the generated PDFs, but indeed this isn’t ideal for future score revisions and collaborative work.