Open peteranglea opened 1 year ago
Oh, it's very much on the radar, don't worry! The fact that the lyrics can't by default extend outside the confines of the bar is a unfortunate legacy of how this system was designed some time ago. We'll rip it out and fix it.
Awesome! Is there a roadmap I could follow along with (simply out of curiosity)?
Your idea
Allow lyric syllables to observe tighter, less restrictive horizontal spacing.
Problem to be solved
Often, when engraving music with multiple verses/stanzas, syllables of varying widths in different stanzas present a horizontal spacing issue. First, the longest syllable in a given beat sets the boundary box for all the verses. Second, syllables are not allowed to escape the boundary of the measure in which they are placed.
This generally results in wider spacing than desired since no "overlap" is allowed. This is particularly problematic when engraving hymns, as line width is often at a premium and there are often several verses.
Here is an approximation of what a better solution might look like. The basic idea is that syllables can "overlap" and not have such a rigidly defined outer boundary.
Prior art
I have engraved well over 100 hymns in Lilypond and, whereas their lyric spacing algorithm isn't perfect either, it does observe more intelligent horizontal spacing by default. At a minimum, the measure boundaries do not interfere (see the syllable "mount")
MuseScore here doesn't let a syllable escape the measure.
Additional context
Related bug report here on musescore.com. https://musescore.org/en/node/338887