Possible Bug: Lyric Spacing

Dorico
#1

So far I’ve entered over 1,500 verses of hymn lyrics in Dorico. There is an odd spacing quirk that I often run into. In a system with plenty of room, two words will be too close to each other - sometimes even overlapping. If I nudge one of the words or enable the horizontal offset, Dorico will appear to “remember” about the spacing gap and move them apart the proper amount. My guess is that the spacing algorithm is somehow skipping over these words.

This picture shows the words with the default (incorrect) spacing:
lyric - no offset.png
This picture shows what happens when I turn on the horizontal spacing (set to zero):
lyric - offset.png

#2

I’ve spotted this too.

#3

Me too. It’s really problematic because I need to be careful about the lyrics in a “pre-Dorico” way…

#4

Can you please zip up and attach here a minimal case that reproduces the problem? Evan, in your case, hopefully exporting just one flow from one of your monster projects would be sufficient for me to reproduce the problem.

We have just today fixed a bug with the way that lyrics are automatically adjusted to try to avoid changing the rhythmic spacing. We have not yet established whether this bug fix will be safe enough to make it into the forthcoming minor update; it has the potential to change the appearance of lyrics in existing projects so we need to take some time to look at a lot of projects that use lyrics to see what the effect is.

#5

Thanks for your response, Daniel. Here’s an example flow with default spacing (no changes yet in engrave mode). There are at least 4 instances of the spacing issue - see the accompanying image.

example.png
example.png872×796 73.5 KB

600 O Lord, My God, I Cry to Thee.zip (270 KB)

#6

Thanks for the example, Evan. I’m glad to say that the result looks better following today’s fix – see the attached version.

I can’t promise that we will be able to include this fix in the forthcoming minor update, but if it doesn’t make it into that update, I would consider it almost certain for the following one.

lyrics-fix.png
lyrics-fix.png1176×1096 92.8 KB

#7

Much improved, Daniel! I’m curious: With today’s fix, what happens if you toggle the horizontal spacing on the words that once were too close? Does the space between them grow at all now? From the example, I can’t tell if the corrected spacing is the full amount or not.

#8

The gaps will move a bit, yes, because the spacing will change a bit. As you know, Dorico adjusts the horizontal position of lyrics as much as it can to prevent the rhythmic space from becoming distorted by the text, but as soon as you apply any kind of horizontal offset to a lyric, even a zero offset that doesn’t move it, all of that wiggling is disabled, and the lyric will often cause the spacing to be widened locally in order to meet the minimum requested space either side of the lyric as specified in Engraving Options.

#9

Thanks for explaining how a zero offset disables wiggling. Good to know.