Separate customizations for Lyric hyphen character in lyrics and translations

Hello,
This is by no means a life or death request, but it would be great to be able to customize the lyric hyphen character for translations. In vocal music, it’s quite common to have the International Phonetic Alphabet pronunciation underneath the text, and the common lyric hyphen character is a period (.) as opposed to a hyphen.
Many thanks,

You can change the detault hyphen character, however it will mess up the regular lyrics, unfortunately. IPA is indeed a big deal; certainly in american collegiate circles at any rate.

Therein lies the rub. I would like to maintain hyphens for the text, but use periods for the IPA.

Indeed. Perhaps there needs to be a dedicated IPA lyrics line with its own rules (perhaps pressing arrow down twice past the regular translation level).

2 Likes

Thanks for the feedback. I think providing an engraving option for the hyphen character to use in “translation” lyric lines would be the simplest way to handle this, provided you plan to use the “translation” lyric line for your IPA.

I’d like to add that I like including Cyrillic and English transliterations in stacked lines of lyrics, each with their own hyphen styles. Russian music, for example, commonly uses underscores instead of hyphens. It would be lovely to have per-lyric-number options (as well as per-word properties).

Welcome to the forum! A good idea.

I had just missed this topic when I signed back on last year. As for the OP, it is completely unnecessary to write periods in IPA lyrics, because the syllables are already visually separated. The only (comparatively rare) use of the period is where syllable division could be ambiguous – usually adjacent vowels.