Re: Lyric misalignment solved. Was Re: Lyric misalignment and beaming?

[David Kastrup]

Arle Lommel <address@hidden> writes:

> Thanks very much to Carl Sorenson for a response that got me to start paring 
> things
> down even more and led me to find the problem in my score where I didn’t
> previously look. Took a while
>
> Basically, if autoBeam is off (somehow I’d turned it off outside a
> variable where I was defining things), the Lyrics somehow follow the
> manual beaming to guide their placement rather than slurs, but if it
> is on, they ignore it and act as they should.

Either way is acting as it should.

The manual has an index entry "beam, with lyrics" for the chapter
"Setting automatic beam behavior" but there is no usable reference
whatsoever in that chapter.  I actually find rather little elsewhere
either, there are mostly just some allusions to manual beaming and
lyrics that don't make it into a definitive statement about LilyPond's
behavior rather than a general typesetting practice.

It's sort of an "everyone knows this except the manual" situation
apparently.

Generally, with \autoBeamOff, beams indicate melismata.  With
\autoBeamOn, they don't, not even manual beams.  That's actually also
important in MIDI where syllables are put into the music as well, so
changes made to autobeaming should be done identically in MIDI.

So if you want to have beaming be independent from lyric syllables, you
need to keep \autoBeamOn but override the default beaming with your own
beams.

-- 
David Kastrup