I’ve had scenarios where there are a larger number of stanzas, and one or more of the middle stanzas needs to be marked on every line. I’m presenting these as options that work moderately well, but I’d be interested in seeing what others do.
Italicizing the whole line is not a good option for me. It’s typographically disruptive.
I can of course drag text items into place, but this is really not ideal. It’s tedious for large projects, and more importantly, it’s difficult to make things consistent.
I have two scenarios presently.
1. In the first, client asked for a dot before the 3rd or 4th stanza, depending on how many there were. I set up a font variation called “[Font name] Dot” which converted the grave glyph into a zero-width bullet with a negative left side bearing. I set that grave character to be omitted from spacing in Engraving Options, and added it as a one-off paragraph style:
However, this doesn’t solve the question of what to do when the dot is included in the first system preceding the stanza number. Thankfully client didn’t want that. If he did, I’m not sure what I’d do.
2. In a different project, another client asked for underlined stanza numbers. So I modified a font to underline the 3, called it [Font name] UL3," and assigned that to the paragraph style for lyric numbers:
But this part only works when the stanza number is repeated on each line, such as in the Anglican chant here. For standard hymns where the number does not repeat, I also modified the grave glyph to be zero-width with a negative sight-side bearing:
Then I can assign a paragraph style to each syllable as needed:
It’s fast enough once it’s set up, and it’s very consistent, but it’s tedious. I’d like to hear what other solutions folks have for this, and I’m hopeful this can be added as a feature eventually…