Christopher, Mark et al,
I don't know how to get this right all the time. I start with left
alignment for chords, but I nudge many to the left, and things are
never really beautiful without more adjustment than I am willing to
devote time to make. I usually settle for a general alignment and no
crashes. I don't work with lyrics often, though I have similar
problems and often adjust syllables. I'd be screaming about it, if I
thought I was smart enough to come up with programmable parameters
for consistently good alignment. Since I am not that smart about
this, and I see many variables, I tend to think it would be difficult
to accomplish. People smarter about turning visual placement into
math may feel differently.
Chuck
On Oct 15, 2006, at 2:55 PM, Christopher Smith wrote:
Mark,
Thanks for a great overview about lyric spacing. One thing you
didn't mention at all is how the rhythmic value of the note might
affect spacing, particularly if there is a long syllable on a short
note value, like "through" on a sixteenth. I seem to run into this
an awful lot, and I can NEVER get a measure with this combination
in it to look right, no matter what I do. Possibly this is because
I don't really know what takes precedence over what.
On Oct 15, 2006, at 4:46 PM, Mark D Lew wrote:
- I routinely nudged to the right any syllable ending with a comma
or period. This falls under the rubric of mathematical centering
vs visual centering. Understandably, Finale's basic algorithm is
to figure the width of the text and center it exactly. But to the
eye, the text's center of gravity is with the letters, not the
punctuation mark, so the lyric looks lopsided to the left. To my
eye, the period or comma does carry some weight, so I wouldn't
center the letters alone, either, but it's closer to that than it
is to the default.
This is analogous to chord symbol spacing as well. The Finale
options are centred or left-aligned. Centred is correct only for
very short chord symbols, like C7. Left-aligned makes a chord
symbol like F#m7 look too far to the right, but centred is horrible
on that. I thought perhaps (to my eye) that the ROOT should be
centred, and let the entire suffix flow off to the right. So C in
C7 would be centred, also F# would centred at the point halfway
between the left side of the F and the right side of the sharp. Or
maybe there is some other alignment point I am missing. I am
certainly not the first one to deal with this problem.
I know Darcy Argue is constantly tweaking his chord alignments.
Darcy, if you are reading this, what do you look at when you nudge
chord symbols?
Christopher
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Chuck Israels
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