Special verse numbers for lyrics

I understood that I can add easily and nicely verse numbers to lyrics, what is an amazing pro compared to Finale, but some cases the numbers are not consequitive, t.i. first line is verse 1/a, second is 1/b, or all lines have consequitive odd or even numbers, t.i. first line is #1, and the second is #3, etc.

I’ve tried to move first syllables in engrave mode, but the first note what is tailored to the extensive first syllable of the the lyirc (like 1/ The…) doesn’t move, and it leads to a funny result.

Is there any solution for this in Dorico or I need to make a big effort to move many notes and syllables to get a nice result?

Can you post an image of what you are seeing or that portion of your Dorico file?

Here you input line #1 as verse 1
and line #3 as verse 3.

When having repeats,
you can input line 1/b as verse 2 and hide the verse number.

As a last resort you could also input the verse numbers as lyric text, followed by a hard space.


This is what I meant:)

I would personally recommend simply adding /a ____ and /b ____ as the first lyric itself in those spots.

Occasionally, I add dummy beats and hide them to have a spare “lyric” that I repurpose as a fake custom verse number, or I just add the special text that I want as the first part of the lyric itself. No one knows the difference if you use the same font for lyrics and verse numbers.

You can do additional formatting via the edit single lyric dialogue as well.

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Thank you @Romanos , how can I create dummy beat?:slight_smile: I mean how can I hide them?

[NB: this presupposes you are not concerned about playback.]

shift-B, 1q, enter

The command will add one quarter note wherever you’ve placed the caret. Then you will have rests. You now can choose between two options:
1.) select the rests and scale them to 1% which will effectively hide them but leave the horizontal space at that location (recommended)
or
2.) add fake verse number lyrics first and then hide rests and adjust note spacing in engrave mode.

Hiding rests will effectively cause the beat to disappear, so if you do this before adding the lyrics at that point, you will have nothing to select to anchor the lyrics, hence my suggestion to add the lyrics before hiding the rests.


In this example, I’ve added an extra beat, 2nd-5th are all regular lyrics attached to it, I then used the edit single lyric dialogue to change them all to be bold + italic, and then I selected the rest and scaled it to 1%. Here is the result:

You can also create a special paragraph style (if necessary) and just select those lyrics and then assign it.

But as you can see, it’s very easy to achieve what you’re desiring:

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I should also mention:
You can, of course, achieve the desired result simply by using the edit single lyric dialogue and adding the extra verse numbers there, but it may mess up note spacing.

In my particular example, it worked better to have the extra beat because I was labelling liturgical days, and needed to have “presentation” be one of the labels, which wouldn’t work very well as an ordinary lyric.

So you do not HAVE to add a beat; it is context dependent. But your example above was a good proof of why I add extra beats. Your example image has the actual lyric shoved way off to the side. (This can be corrected in engrave mode, of course.)

@Romanos , thank you so much! You helped me a lot! Thanks!

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