How can I enter a hyphen that should appear as part of the lyric text, rather than being interpreted as a lyric hyphen?
For example:
“Vilnius - capital of Lithuania”
I need “Vil-nius”, followed by a space-hyphen-space sequence, and then “capital”.
I found that on my Mac, Option+Minus inserts a hyphen that Dorico treats as text rather than as a lyric hyphen. However, how can I add the space before and after it? Is there a way to enter a space-hyphen-space sequence within a lyric?
If you’re talking about a dash, rather than a hyphen, which is meant to indicate a ‘change’ in the logical structure of a sentence – usually like a parenthesis (as I’ve just done before ‘usually’),
A dash usually informs the intonation and creates a pause, but in music, this is going to be achieved by the music itself, so ultimately the dash’s interpretation will be limited by the notes.
Thank you so much for all your friendly responses. Yes, benwiggy I meant a dash, and it works perfectly. I just wasn’t sure whether there is a way to place it exactly in a middle between two syllables so that it would be adjusted automatically when changing the note spacing. But anyway, that’s only a minor wish. Thank you all again
The best you can do is make sure that the option to ignore punctuation in lyric spacing is on, so that the letters are aligned to the note, and the space-dash-space bit is not considered ‘part’ of the syllable.
Depending on the exact meaning, I think it’s more usual to have it nearer the first word, rather than centred between the two.
Here’s RVW’s Songs of Travel (B&H 1905), where Stevenson’s poem has a dash:
White as meal frosty field —
Warm the fireside haven.
The simplest way to do absolutely any variant of hyphens or dashes is to use Edit Single Lyric (I’ve assigned it to Cmd-Opt-Shift-L) and add the hyphens, dashes, or spaces to the selected syllable in the edit window.
