On Jul 28, 2007, at 1:04 PM, Robert Patterson wrote:
I have not made much use of the lyrics feature of finale up until
now. But I am starting a songbook, and if some one wants to let me
know again about some of the issues around lyrics, I would
appreciate it very much.
I plan to combine all the songs into a single Finale file, unless I
hear it is a really bad idea.
Make sure you know the order before you start work, as changing the
order of tunes is likely to cause the most problems. Unless you save
all the page stuff for the very end.
1. Should I create a separate "verse" for the text of each song, or
should I place all the text in one "verse"? If they are separate,
won't I end up fiddling with base lines a great deal?
Assuming each song has only one line of lyrics, I would put them all
in the same verse. You are going to mess around with baselines
anyway, since music that never descends below the staff needs
different lyric baselines than music that does go beneath the staff.
Set a basic baseline, then adjust system by system (3rd arrow from
the left) near the end of the process.
2. What is this hyphenation bug and word extension bug I keep
reading about here?
Say two syllables separated by a hyphen are close together. If space
is very tight, the hyphen could be removed if it interferes too much
with spacing and causes collisions. Finale started doing that for you
(I think) in 2006, but in 2007 the default spacing is tight enough
for Finale to take out a bunch of hyphens that probably should have
stayed.
Furthermore, when the syllables are very close together, we would
like some leading white space removed before the hyphen, but that
doesn't happen, it just crams up close to the next syllable.
Furthermore, some hyphens that show up onscreen get removed somewhere
during the printing process, due to some flaw in the WYSIWYG stuff,
so you have to print, check, add some hyphens back in manually, and
even them sometimes a hyphen comes back by itself so you have TWO
hyphens slightly overlapped.
There is some problem with hyphens over system breaks too, but I am
so pissed off about the disappearing hyphens that I haven't even
looked to see if it is still there in 2008, or even what it is.
Word extensions seems to work OK for me, but maybe I've never seen
the circumstances where the problem occurs. Anyone care to elaborate?
3. Is there some way (plugin or program) to recreate all the
correct hyphenations and extensions if they get messed up?
The problem is convincing Finale what is the correct thing to do, and
Finale is notoriously pigheaded. 8-) I sometimes manually space
measures, nudging bit by bit until a hyphen comes back, but I find I
do that a lot in vocal music anyway. I don't know of any mass method.
I sometimes remove a hyphen entirely from the Edit Lyrics window and
add it back in on the score as a note expression. At least this
method ensures that it stays where I put it!
I know that my Mass Copy plugin does not work with hyphenation and
word extensions. I am working to rectify that as best as possible.
If there is an easy way to repair them, that will make my life easier.
Anything you can come up with to alleviate the situation would help
us, but it would also take pressure off MakeMusic to FIX the darn
things!
Maybe some others can shed more light.
Christopher
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