And I want Dorico to fire up my coffee machine and remind me to take coffee breaks at set (configurable, of course) intervals. 
Hey Guys
That’s exactly what I meant! Personally I never ever use connected barlines for choir notation, but every once in a while there are situations where things get a bit squeezed, it would be nice to white out the background of one lyric syllable. But you senior members have your fun with me and go on with your lecture … but please stay open minded, because one day even you can come in a situation, where this possibility could suit you well … and besides, if you ever conducted a double choir this grouping with the connected barlines isn’t all that bad in a live situation as Jazzisfaction stated above. And another one are those piano scores with the text in the middle and yes it’s really bad, bad notation, but it exists.
So the development team should invest time developing features that specifically accommodate “really bad, bad notation”?
I can understand supporting certain optional things like connecting barlines BETWEEN choral groups (between bracketed groups of vocal staves), or connecting final barlines on each stave (again, following bracketed groups). I can also understand supporting shiftX text whiting out background. But I really don’t see the point in connecting staves. Honestly, if I was doing something that would get my scores rejected by a publisher, I’d want to know. Some rules have wiggle room; others, like this one, are very well codified in modern practice.
I also think it is legitimate for Dorico (any notation software) to carefully consider exactly what it allows users to do. We all know that there are weird things that have become common on poorly-conceived scores shared online just because a program was capable of doing it (worse still, it was a default) and the person who created the score didn’t even know they were doing something wrong. Case in point: scan CPDL. There are absolutely atrocious scores on there. Not allowing vocal staves with connecting lines, as a matter of principle to follow best-practice is actually a wise design decision, IMHO, as it pushes the user toward best practice whether they realize it or not. I’m sure Dorico doesn’t want to be known as the software that was used to create a bunch of wacky (read: crappy) scores on the internet. Crumb is one thing. The graphic element was a specific part of the work’s conception from the beginning. Frustrating-to-read octavos just because an editor hasn’t carefully considered a universal standard and the software was poorly conceived to default output a bad result is quite another. At least the OP was attempting a workaround for something else, not actually attempting to use the line as lyrics proper. Credit where credit is due.
All of that said, as a shoutout to the OP: there is one instance where I wished for this myself in the service of actual lyrics, and that was when I was indicating a section break with a double barline and wanted a single line of lyrics for a soloist to continue through the barline, but wanted the other parts connected since they were resting and I wanted to make it obvious. (The soloist had a long line of recitative chant that extended through the bar; everyone else had rests with a fermata and a meter change.) Perhaps there could be an option to support whiting out on a lyric-by-lyric basis with a toggle for special exceptions. Like the others, I definitely don’t support flouting the standard here.
So the development team should invest time developing features that specifically accommodate “really bad, bad notation”?
Sorry Dan, my apologies I tried to be ironic here, but my english was apparently not good enough. But that wasn’t my point here. I was concerned about the rather disrespectful tone with which the initial request was handled, whether it was justified or not. If someone has a problem, he does not want to be lectured from above or even ridiculed, even if the problem is perhaps completely unimportant. But fortunately, Romanos has also experienced that sometimes it could be really useful to add a background to single syllables.
Last but not least I would like to add that the general editing of text (or lyrics) is still very rudimentary even in Dorico 3, which has taken up the cause of making desktop publishing programs obsolete. So I’m really counting on Dorico 4, That gets all these text issues settled.
I reread the thread and didn’t see any ridicule or disrespect.
James: I immediately thought of CPDL as well. When it became a wiki about 15 years ago, the quality absolutely tanked. It was a real shame. Now you have to wade through 50 painfully illegible scores to find one that’s usable.
Every answer I give is one that I would hope to receive. Sometimes, the best answer to “How can I do this?” is “Don’t do that.”
Dorico is still young, and is clearly focusing on implementing standard, conventional notation before it gets to extreme-use cases. My scores are certainly improved by Dorico automatically doing things that I would otherwise have to remember the rules (and exceptions) for, and then do them myself.
As others have said, there are thousands of CPDL scores that would be vastly improved if they were just rinsed through Dorico’s defaults. Standards exist for a reason. Once you’ve learnt them, by all means, break them if you think it justified.
There’s a conversation to be had about the extent to which a notation app should cater to novel notation forms. But this isn’t it. 
1 Like
I’m resurrecting this thread because it hints at the problem I’m having, though it’s not exactly the same as anything above.
Childrens’ piano music for beginners often has lyrics between the staves of the Grand Staff, which does have barlines all the way through the GS vertically. And sometimes when such a piano score is created in Dorico, the (real) lyrics do hit the barline, at the beginning of a measure. (The first lyric word in the measure touches the barline just before it.) They don’t cross over it, but they do touch it, which looks bad to my eye. I’ve studied the Engraving Options under the Lyrics category quite a bit, and I can’t find any way to fix this. Not either by making some global adjustment, nor by moving the one offending word independently of the others.
And, no, I don’t think putting lyrics into piano pieces is necessarily ‘bad notation.’ (Adding a vocal line above the piano part would confuse the beginning pianist, in my opinion.). And even if it is, it’s standard practice in the publishers of many ‘lesson books.’
So . . . does anybody know of a relatively easy fix for this problem? (The solution posted to the OP’s first post here does not seem to exist any longer?)
1 Like
Honestly, I suppose the quickest way would be to take a pdf into affinity publisher or indesign and select the effected words and give them a white outline or add a white fill to its bounding box. Either that or nudge them all out of the way in dorico.
Forgive my ignorance, but how does one ‘nudge’ only the offending words? I have found only ways to move the entire line up or down, nothing horizontal, which is what I need.
From memory, so it might not be quite accurate - in Engrave mode, click on the syllable and use Alt/Opt+left-arrow or right-arrow to move it in small steps. Adding other modifier keys (shift, etc.) should move it in larger steps.
In engrave mode, select the offending ‘word’ and turn on the offset (left-most panel in properties). Use the up/down arrows to adjust the horizontal (x-value) position of the word.
Just select the word and hold alt and use the l/r arrows.
@L3B
One could also choose any syllable and use the alignment property to align that syllable Left rather than Center.
Thanks Romanos, that fixed it in about 11 seconds!
Now I have a harder question: Where would I have found that in Dorico Help? If it’s there I certainly couldn’t find it.
FWIW I googled Dorico move lyrics. The first result was that page in the Dorico 2.2.20 version of the manual. Search results may vary dependent on region, device type, user search history etc.
I keep. forgetting that using Google to search for stuff in Dorico is better sometimes than using search within Dorico itself or in the forum. Thanks for the reminder.
For the alignment property, you can find that here.
In as large a manual as Dorico’s has become, of course searching as a primary method is going to be extremely useful in a lot of cases. However, if I may be so bold (and this is a general point that I’m just happening to share in this thread today, nothing personal!), there is a fair amount of consideration that goes into the segmentation, organisation, titling, and hierarchy of pages in the manual and we (myself and my eagle-eyed manuals colleagues) put not inconsiderable effort into being as consistent and logical as possible, particularly across/between Notation reference chapters. Therefore, another way to look for things is to follow likely-sounding topics in the webhelp (particularly now you can expand headings with child pages without having to click on that page).
For instance, most “chapters” in the Notation reference have a page titled “Positions of X” or “General placement conventions for X”. E.g. here for lyrics. On these pages, you should find some reference to common/accepted practices of positioning/ordering that item (if relevant/applicable) and generic references to your options in Dorico: that you can move where they exist in time in Write mode (rhythmically), adjust them on the page in Engrave mode (graphically), and change the defaults in Engraving Options to affect all instances. The child pages of these topics in most cases include instructions for how to move the item in these ways (although going forward I have removed most of these in favour of generic instructions elsewhere to minimise excess non-notation-specific pages) and other relevant position/placement options - for lyrics, this includes the alignment property.
Searching is of course absolutely fine, and I do also keep regular notes of how people describe things so that I can add additional keywords to relevant pages to improve search results, but (and I am of course biased) I would say that some familiarity with the manual as a whole is beneficial in the long run, if only so people feel more confident when using/searching it.
(There are also some regular expression-style tricks you can use when searching directly in the webhelp, like putting exact phrases inside “quotation marks”)
I appreciate the hard work that you and all of your colleagues put in. I did not mean anything I said to imply otherwise.
I’d like to explain one of my problems with Dorico help: I don’t always know what to call things. “Lyrics” is pretty obvious as to meaning, but when one is trying to find out how to move a lyric syllable to avoid the collision with a barline, I really have no idea what words to use in my search. Since the designers of Dorico seem to have assumed that lyrics will always be used with vocal staves (which is logical, of course), lyrics CAN’T collide with barlines, since barlines in vocal parts do not extend above or below the stave and lyrics never go into the staff itself. So the problem I see is that when I’m looking for information about issues that don’t conform to the developers’ assumptions, I get easily stuck trying to describe the problem or trying to decide what to search for in Help. The current discussion is just one example. I could provide many others. And of course you can’t be expected to foresee every oddball need that goes beyond the boundaries of said assumptions, including MY oddball needs!
So the problem is inherent in the situation. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just something I have to wrestle with now and then. My intuition (wrongly) tells me that I should just be able to grab something and move it, and sometimes that sort of approach works and sometimes it doesn’t. Trying to guess which will occur in any given situation is just frustrating, that’s all. In asking how I should have searched, I wasn’t criticizing. I was trying to educate myself for future occurrences of this sort of problem.
–Len
Not that I don’t find myself stumped sometimes, but when I need to modify something, I generally start looking at t he properties and various options, depending on whether I think my needs are to alter layout or engraving aspects of the item in question.
With no slight to Lillie, I find it faster in most circumstances to eyeball the options available in properties, layout, engrave, or notations before I dive into the manuals unless I want something I think will come up really quickly in a search through Help.