Weird hyphens at end of line

Good evening,
Aren’t the small hyphens at the end of bar 13 rather weird? They are fixed by left- or center-aligning the syllables. But these syllables SHOULD be left-alligned. What is it that I don’t know this time?
Rune.

Perhaps you meant “These syllables should be right-aligned”? Actually those syllables should be center-aligned, not left- or right-aligned.

First syllables in a system should be left, all subsequent syllables should be centered. It is not standard practice to right-align final syllables in a system.

I agree with Rune, I find myself quite often having to move those hyphens at the end of a line (I’m quite sure I already talked about that problem some months ago…) They even get misaligned sometimes.

I have seen a similar anomaly with hyphens at the beginning of a line: they do not always keep out of the way of lyric syllables. I just adjusted the note spacing.

Yes, I’ve seen this too, and was just going to comment on it!


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In Dorico, as far as I can see, when the last syllable in a system has a hyphen after it, it is left-aligned by default. (Possibly only when also the notes are tied to the next system, I haven’t checked out that thoroughly.)
So I thought that was the standard way to do it?

Left-alignment should only apply to the first lyric in a system, or when the lyric has an extension (___). All other lyrics should be center-aligned.

This is firm and consistent practice in the hymnal realm, in my experience. But I confess I can’t find any place where it is explicitly codified.

I haven’t used Dorico for hymnal settings yet, but I hope this setting can be changed in the future.

The issue is, Dorico has run out of space. It’s trying to keep everything in the margin. Go to Engrave mode and give the last note in the system some extra space and see what happens.

Dorico is getting the alignments of the lyric syllables themselves correct, but it doesn’t force there to be sufficient room for the hyphen as well when the last syllable is tight on the end of the system. It doesn’t take long to tweak the note spacing to take care of this, however.