Nice surprise in Edit Line of Lyrics

A nice little comfort when using the Edit Line of Lyrics tool. It does now remember the view font size. That’s new in Version 4.
Also (I can’t help it) for me the readability has improved a lot over the prior version, probably new fonts are been used?

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And the option for no-hyphens at the start of a line is a godsend one :pray:

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Marc, I know you are the expert of hyphens, dashes, en-dashes and the lot…
Sometimes I try to input a non breaking hyphen or something a bit longer after a syllable; but on Mac I can only get this long— (Shift-Alt-Hyphen) or the Hyphen- ( Unicode Input: Alt and type in 002D). Is there something half way between these two? I might have asked the same question already somewhere in this forum earlier - but can’t find it…

There’s the so-called n-dash: – (option-hyphen on my Dutch keyboard).

Indeed. Actually, I sent a private message to understand what the need was: I certainly do not need anything other than hyphen (U+002D) in lyrics, and to have them properly laid out, I need to add short unbreakable spaces (U+202F) before and after. Unfortunately, those short unbreakable spaces are not available in most fonts, I had to add them with a proper application. Funny thing is they do appear in Dorico while inputting the lyrics, but I had to add them in Academico.

Thank you Pjotr, I will try again, once I am at my computer tomorrow.

Yes, the en-dash – is U+2013. (The long em-dash — is U+2014.)

there are three gradations easily available on Mac:
-(use the regular - key)
– (alt -)
— (alt shift -)

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Ah, I forgot we can type – and — into lyrics the Macintosh way. [Edited:] But we still have to resort to Unicode hex input if you want to include a hyphen U+002D in a lyric syllable. (I recently used this to show broken words of a hocket between voices.)

Alt+shift+space. I use it all the time.

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The hard space is too long. We need fonts with short unbreakable space U+202F. From a picky point of view (aren’t we all picky here?)

For a smaller space, wouldn’t the regular thin space U+2009 work? since there’s no issue of word-wrap within a lyric syllable. Then I would hope you wouldn’t have to mess with fonts, because space characters in a fallback font should still display correctly.

Thank you Pjotr, Marc and Mark,

today I went through all your suggestions, and it is fantastic that we have all these possibilities to fine tune the lyrics appearance, some of them new to me - even if they were quite obvious…

My list looks like this now:

using the mac keyboard:
-hyphen = - (not whilst in lyric input mode)
– en-dash = alt -
— em-dash = shift alt -
[space] = space (not whilst in lyric input mode)
[hard space] = shift alt space

using Unicode with the mac keyboard:
-hyphen = (alt +) 002d
– en-dash = (alt +) 2013
— em-dash = (alt +) 2014
[short hard space] = (alt +) 202f
[hard space] = (alt +) 2009
[hard space] = (alt +) 00a0

(I could not see a difference between the last two codes U2209 and U00A0)

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