Using Dorico 6 on Mac here. I have a set of lyrics in a text document. As usual, each line ends with a hard line break, which is desirable in the text document, but not desired when the text is applied to a series of notes in Dorico. In Dorico, the linebreak is preserved for whatever syllable was followed by a line break, with the next syllable moved to the next line, resulting in a stray floating syllable (see attached screenshot).
While I can imagine situations where one might want a line break in a lyric, it is obviously not what i want here.
I don’t see how I can remove the line break character in Dorico to adjust it. I do see I can delete the whole “syllable plus line break plus next syllable” and retype it in without the line break. Or I can find/change all linebreaks to spaces in my lyric in the text document as a workflow step. But maybe there’s some more convenient way of dealing with this in Dorico?
Hi. I’ve been using Dorico for over eight years now, with mainly vocal music and I have never experienced this. I am quite surprised so I’d like to understand your workflow… How do you get your text copied as lyrics? Why isn’t it hyphenated (fron-ce)? Some words are missing (probably “les” before sour-cils)?
If you have problems with the way the source is formatted, copy the text in a simple text editor, remove all problematic commands (such as line breaks), hyphenate it correctly, then copy it and paste it into Dorico through the Lyrics popover
Thanks for your response. That told me that it was not a common problem, so I tried to isolate it.
I see now that it’s problematic using certain Mac programs for the text. A simple text editor like BBEdit works fine, MSWord works fine, but I was using Notes and InDesign, and Dorico is apparently getting some sort of formatting from those programs that it treats differently and causes the problem.
Apologies for including some other errors in my screenshot; not the point of my post but appreciate that you pointed them out in case I hadn’t noticed them.
I’m a Mac user of Dorico 6, too. Mac’s native TEXT app works fine for me as does Pages. I’ve not needed to use a non-native text app for this purpose. I am curious if these two caused issues for you. I’m on Mac Studio M2 Max with macOS Sequoia 15.6.1.
Kurt, If you want to paste text from a text editor into the lyrics line of Dorico, you will have to prepare the text in your text editor first!
It does not matter which editor it is coming from: you will have to do the hyphenating - and you will have to remove the line breaks.
Once you have done that preparation, (only then) copy your text and you will be able to paste it flawlessly into Dorico, syllable by syllable. Note, in some text editors text will automatically reflow into the next line. This is not a line break.
What’s really surprising here is not that there’s a line break: it’s actually a change of verse! I did not know that it was possible to have that by a simple paste operation. @Kurt, you’re absolutely right, this is not a widespread issue, as I told you it’s the first time I see it since Dorico 1 was available!
I encountered this behavior sometimes when I C&P lyrics from certain websites into Pages (I’m on Mac too) after changing some capitalization and interpunction and pasting the lyrics into the lyrics popover.
I fixed it by deleting and reentering the linefeed characters.
I think it really depends on what the source of the lyrics would be, digitally, of course. Line breaks (in olden, early PC days we called these CR & LF for carriage return and line feed as what happens when one hits the return lever on the manual typewriter carriage or the Return key on electric typewriters) are intuitively an enemy to lyrics functions to my mind.
I learned that with Finale many years ago with its convoluted approach to lyrics so I always remove those line breaks by placing copied text into a text editor. It’s fascinating to me how we each have our own approach to such things and how those approaches have been developed.
Hi – Yeah, i didn’t know about the ‘Edit Single Lyric’ feature at that point. That’s correct, that I could have deleted my line break there. I tried it just now.
However, it seems like one doesn’t have to delete linebreaks if you are preparing your texts using text editor apps that are compatible with Dorico. In those cases, Dorico ignores the linebreaks. I like keeping the line breaks in my source document, easier to see what’s going on than if the whole text is run together.
Hi Marc
No, it’s just moved to the next line, it remains defined as Verse 1. I just tried a little experiment to see. In addition, it will collide with a Verse 2 part. The ‘Before’ and ‘After’ in my fake lyric here refers to before/after a linebreak character.
There are line breaks, and there are line breaks with a carriage return. (And carriage returns without line breaks.) I suspect that Dorico is observing one such combination, but ignoring another. Presumably, InDesign is supplying line breaks and carriage returns.
If you use a soft return (Shift Return, I think) in InDesign, you might find that Dorico ignores this.
Hi Ben
Using BBEdit, I tested LR, CR and CR+LR line breaks, and none of them resulted in problems in Dorico. It ignored them.
Resorting to my slightly unreliable pal, ChatGPT, it explained that InDesign’s line breaks are defined as paragraph breaks (Unicode U+2029). That seems to be the gremlin that trips me up using certain Mac apps as my text editor for lyrics.
What i have found is that even if I’m using a sympathetic app, a soft-return (\n) will create the problem as well. Whereas hard returns (\r) are happily ignored by Dorico.
