Re: Lyrics bugs and bracket problem (NTG meeting)

[Mats Bengtsson]

Maarten Wisse wrote:
> Dear Lilypond-developers,
>
> First, congrats. with the release of 1.8. I've upgraded to it. As Han-Wen 
> suggested at the NTG meeting last May in Zeist, I report some bugs with the 
> lyrics handling. I basically try to mimic a modern edition of Lasso's 
> Lectiones on Job (A&R editions, to be precise). I do not use \addlyrics 
> functionality, because that caused even more problems. I don't report on them 
> now. I have forgotten most of them because I quickly switched to manual note 
> and lyrics combination. What I do want to mention, however, is that to my 
> suprise, the switch from \addlyrics to manual combination results in much 
> better note -- lyrics alignment.

Lilypond has support to align the lyrics based on the punctuation.
This is partly described at
http://lilypond.org/doc/v1.8/Documentation/user/out-www/lilypond/More-stanzas.html
but I have to admit I've never understod completely how it works and how
you can override it setting the alignment manually. You should really
take a look at the examples lyric-align.ly and lyric-phrasing.ly in
http://lilypond.org/doc/v1.8/input/regression/out-www/collated-files.html
to see what the possibilities are. As far as I know, the default is to
align each syllable centered below the note.

> My main worries are with the lyrics alignment. All problems are nicely 
> illustrated by the attached fragment:
>
> 1. The first `Pec-' in the soprano is to much to the right. There seems to be 
> a Lyrics.indent setting which might influence this, but I didn't try that 
> out---Han-Wen suggested a bug report anyway.
>
> 2. The single hyphens used on the first note of a new bar -- ok, looks awful 
> but this is how the critical edition has it -- is too much to the right.

If the hints above don't help, you could always fool Lilypond by adding
spaces at the beginning or end of a syllable:
"-   " (or equivalently -____ )

> 3. `vi,' in the alto, tenor, and bass voices is too much to the left.
>
> 4. The __ after `vi,' in the soprano is too long. It should stop somewhere 
> BEFORE the rest---no idea what the typograhical rule is for such things.
>
> Finally, there is another problem appearing when one uses:
> lilypond --header=texidoc filename.ly
> latex filename.tex
> dvips -E -o filename.eps filename.dvi
> epstopdf filename.eps filename.pdf
>
> The bounding box created in this way is not entirely correct for the bracket 
> added by the ChoirStaff context. If one includes the pdf generated by 
> epstopdf in LaTeX, the main part of the bracket will disappear (only top and 
> bottom parts to the right are shown). When one includes the eps version in 
> LaTeX with \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{filename}, it becomes clear why 
> in the PDF the bracket disappears. Using the eps version, the bracket moves 
> into the margin. So the bounding box doesn't take the bracket into account in 
> some way or another.

I definitely recommend to use lilypond-book, which automates the
inclusion of music examples in a LaTeX document.
Hmmm, it seems that you use pdflatex. In that case, I can't promise
that lilypond-book works correctly out of the box. I always produce
PDF documents using latex + 'dvips -Ppdf -G0 -u +lilypond.map' + ps2pdf.

   /Mats