SOLVED — French poetry ...tirêt ? —

500 brownie points :slight_smile:

Forwarded directly to G**gl*. Although I would like to cash some in (thank you) just to go back in time to either sister and hear them play but one minute of either of their pieces… talk about under-appreciated.

Dear Mark,
I’m just saying that underscores are not part of French typography, even less when they are used to hyphenate words. I’m wondering what they are supposed to be used for, in French.
[Edit] I checked, and they’re not supposed to be used at all, they’re not part of French typographic arsenal. They were primary used in old typing machines to underline words. Now they are part of computer jargon. I don’t think I would want to use them in as music score :wink:

Thanks, Marc - I see. I think that’s what I was thinking: so it makes me wonder, then, whether they’re there to indicate something akin to crop marks, original page turns, end of lines, emphasis - even - given what I think is the absurdity of cré_é (IOW split it!) because NB is insisting on scrupulous observation of metre.

They are used here to hyphenate the words — when you say or sing “créé”, you have to repeat the sound é (or it won’t mean anything)

Right. So the hyphen is an instruction to the singer - because créé is how it would be spelt normally, isn’t it?

yes. It means created.

Marc,

Right, thanks - so what we see in Leo’s original example must be nothing to do with the actual text and some sort of ‘instruction’ to the performer(s). In which case, maybe it needn’t be a hyphen or an underscore - but some sort of other mark to “split (the word) here”?

The rule is hyphen… I don’t see any reason to break the rule :wink:

Marc, of course not; agreed :slight_smile:

I think I’m stuck on Leo’s point ‘b)’… working forwards from What is it? to another way to represent it, if it is nothing more than a split in the lyrics and has nothing to do with the text itself.

I was wondering whether unicode would help, but actually underscore is used as an alternative to hard spacing (little tie between syllables on the same note), and I 'd be surprised if Dorico did not respond the same way to the underscore key than to its unicode version. I’d have to try it to make sure, but I suppose Pianoleo already explored that zone!

I could add an underscore in a text editor and then paste into Dorico, but that would give me an underscore attached to the first syllable rather than positioned between two syllables and would likely confuse the spacing further.

Regardless, I’m happy with the knowledge that Boulanger’s publisher was idiosyncratic and that that way of hyphenating doesn’t actually add anything of use for the performers.

I’ve seen this kind of ‘underscore hyphens’ in old scores with German and Latin lyrics too. It’s probably not related to the language.

As for your point c), Leo, I haven’t found a way to do this either, and I’d sure love to be able to remove hyphens when the spacing is dense! Maybe at some point in the ideal future… there could be an option to visually ‘glue the two syllables together’ automatically so it looks as though they were never separated.

Re: point c), I’ve succeeded in removing the hyphens from the lyrics manually, forcing more onto a system than Dorico wants, then closing the gaps using the Note Spacing tool. This is laborious but works fine for a project that only uses one Layout.

I agree with Florian. An automated gluing would be an awesome feature, we might expect it in some years (I’m thinking about all the other amazing features that the team will probably create before ^^)
Fingers crossed!

Désolé de jouer au « geek », mais en tant que musicien, typographe, et francophile, j’adore ce fil de discussion !

Cher Vin d’avril,
Ce forum est plein de geeks — fort sympathiques d’ailleurs — bienvenue au club!

Dear Marc,

I tried to copy and paste, but every time I do it, the pop-over jumps to the following Syllable, leaving only the first part of the previous syllable.
See screenshot just after pasted “Où-est”

Thank you by forehand.

Koenraad

Wouldn’t you want Où_est? Underscores indicate an elision of words (or syllables) whereas hyphens separate syllables or compound words. If you put Où-est it looks like the cardinal direction “west” was split in two and misspelled whereas Où_est would indicate to sing the two words together elided.

The solution that is given here used to work until the copy-paste behavior was totally changed in Dorico 3. I use U+2011 for the hyphen and U+202f for short unbreakable space before the hyphen.
For your specific example, it would be a mistake to put an hyphen between those two words. I’d recommend a hard space (or the underscore, but honestly I don’t like it, we don’t use them in opera)