On Oct 6, 2005, at 2:28 AM, Lon Price wrote:
So I finished this project, 24 tunes, most of them at least 4 pages in length. I had to go with "avoid lyric collisions," because the alternative would have created too many collisions for me to deal with.
If it's just a choice of with or without "avoid lyric collisions", then you have to go with it; as you noticed, turning it off makes a huge amount of collisions that are too much to deal with. There are, however, some simple techniques to make it more manageable. Basically, you want to do anything that will give you more horizontal space all around. In an earlier post I mentioned a technique I use which is pretty straightforward. An even cruder way would be to just select all measures and add a certain amount of space to the width of each. The key is that once you've done something to give more space all around, you lock the layout. Then you can respace the whole piece WITHOUT "avoid lyric collisions" and get a reasonably attractive result as your starting point. There'll still be places that you'll need to tweak, but now it will be manageable.
One thing that I noticed: all syllables with word extensions are aligned left (instead of center) by default. When I change the alignment to center, it seems to help. But is that acceptable? Are syllables with word extensions SUPPOSED to be aligned left? Centering looks better to me, but what do I know?
There's plenty of precedent for each way, but left seems to be the majority view these days. I think Ross states a rule asking for left, and a lot of engravers see Ross as the closest thing to authoritative. I personally prefer centered, which may be partly from my background (opera and classical art song). The classical world has a stronger tradition of centered, though it's by no means uniform there either.
In practice, I'll frequently do something which is partway between flush left and centered. I think mathematical centering is overrated, in this computer age. Even aside from the basic problem with punctuation, I think the eye-illusion of centering is more important than the actuality. A long syllable on a long note feels more comfortable a bit more to the right, even if not entirely flush right; a long syllable with an off-center vowel feels more comfortable nudging the vowel nearer to the center of the note; a short syllable under a downstem feels more comfortable nudged a bit toward the stem; etc.
It would be an interesting problem to try to package up all the lyric spacing considerations and make it into an algorithm for "human" lyric spacing, complete with variables that could be set to taste. I'm sure it would still be far from perfect, but there's plenty of room for improvement. About half of the nudges and tweaks I do with lyrics are formulaic and automatic.
mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
