Lyrics suggestions

One of the main reasons I didn’t like Finale is that after decades of development, their lyric editing approach was very buggy. So I would love to see Dorico nail this down. A few suggestions:

  1. After entering in lyrics, if you edit notes, you sometimes get weird behaviour, e.g., words unassociated with a note, etc.
  2. If you use a hyphen, e.g,. A-men, and then Shift-L on the note above the A-, it drops the hyphen. I don’t want to have to enter the hyphen in again.
  1. I don’t understand this one.
  2. Or this.

A hyphen on it’s own doesn’t make any sense. It does connect or bridge the space between two syllables of a word. Which means, you will need at least two separate syllables of a word to make the hyphen appear. How should a software know, wether you decide to change something to one single word or wether you want to correct a syllable?
This cloth “has a soft-touch” - o sorry,
I want to correct this to “has a soft touch”
It should stay your own decision, how you want things spelled, not the software’s

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I guess you want to change the rhythmic position of a note and want the lyric to follow along.

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With item 2, I mean, if I happen to click on a lyric word that ALREADY has a hyphen, and I want the hyphen to stay (I just clicked on the word to confirm spelling let’s say), it drops the hyphen as soon as I enter the box to edit the word.

After editing a lyric using the popover, you need to advance in the same way as previously - ie press (hyphen) to indicate that the word hasn’t finished.

You can also change the syllable type of individual lyrics later to control whether or not they show a hyphen.

There’s also the Edit Lyrics dialog, which allows you to edit text in lyrics in one go and also now (in Dorico 4) preserves properties previously set on lyrics in that line.

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  1. Lyric syllables are attached to rhythmic positions, not notes. But you can move them along with notes if you select them with the notes.
  1. As I understand it, lyrics have a length which is connected to the original notated length. If you alter the note it’s attached to without “re-entering” the lyric (which will reset spacing and lyric lines to the new note length), the results will be “less than optimal.”

  2. If you enter the lyric editing mode (double-click, or ENTER with the lyric selected), “to check it” (not advised), use ESC to leave (not ENTER), even if you make changes to the lyric. That will retain any hyphens or spaces as previously entered. If you use any other command, you MUST re-enter the hyphen or space as needed. (IIRC)

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All I’m saying is that when you click on a word say “To-day” (and let’s say you click on the To-) in MS Word, you don’t expect the hyphen to disappear. But in Dorico, it does. What am I missing?

You’re only missing the fact that confirming the popover with Enter does something specific, namely treat the lyric as if it’s a whole word. Dorico doesn’t really differentiate between editing an existing lyric and entering a new one, so you should always confirm the popover with whatever would be the appropriate keystroke to confirm the kind of lyric you’re after.