In my choir, when we sing Anglican chant, we sometimes like to place brackets under polysyllables.
Kieren (below) provided a way of engraving these brackets. It works well,
except that adjusting \general-align is very manual: As a last step before
I publish a score from Frescobaldi, I zoom in to 800% and adjust the
numerical value manually, tweaking the hundredths place until it “looks”
right. Please see attached a simplified excerpt of my .ly file; you will
see the values varying: #-0.21, #-0.29, #-0.34, #-0.32 … depending on the
context.
Can anyone suggest a way to add these brackets that would preserve perfect
vertical alignment between (a) the letters of lyric words that have
brackets and (b) the letters of normal (unbracketed) words?
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Kieren MacMillan
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2025 at 12:02
Subject: Re: Adding a Script Glyph to One Word of Lyrics (Not to a Musical
Note)
> Another, similar, engraving issue has come up. Is there a way to put
brackets on words?
I searched (quickly, as I have little time right now!) for a way to adjust
the stencil of a lyric tie, but couldn’t find it; that seems like the best
way (to my mind) to do what you want, as it could/should “flex”
automagically.
My fallback would be to simply invert the instructions for the fermata:
verse = \lyricmode {
\once \override LyricText.self-alignment-X = #-0.95
"The heavens declare the"
\markup \override #'(baseline-skip . 0.8) %% adjust to taste
\general-align #Y #-0.15
\center-column { glory \override #'(thickness . 2) \concat { \draw-line
#'(0 . 0.5) \draw-line #'(1.5 . 0) \draw-line #'(0 . 0.5) } } of God;
"and the" firma -- ment
sheweth his handy-work.
}
But maybe someone else has a less manual/hacky solution?!
Psalm 72 - Monk - vMINIMAL for lyric brackets.ly
Description: application/frescobaldi-ly
