Re: Word alignment

[David Wright]

On Sat 18 Jan 2020 at 23:57:56 (+0000), Peter Flynn wrote:
> On 18/01/2020 21:37, Aaron Hill wrote:
> > On 2020-01-18 1:27 pm, Peter Flynn wrote:
> > > Is it possible in lilypond to have the words of the lyrics aligned so
> > > the start of the word is under the note or group, rather than
> > > centered?
> [...]
> > 
> > You should only need to change LyricText.self-alignment-X.
> [snip]
> 
> Perfect, thank you so much. Could this perhaps be added to the
> 'Aligning lyrics to a melody' page at 
> http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.19/Documentation/learning/aligning-lyrics-to-a-melody

It's actually documented as the last item in the section "Manual
syllable durations" and again in the "Snippets" part of the section
"Placing syllables horizontally", but only in the Notation Reference,
which seems appropriate to me. Because LP now¹ sets lyrics by default
with the syllables centre-aligned except for melismas, where they're
left-aligned, there's no real point in introducing this construct
in the Learning Manual when almost nobody will need it.

I hope you don't mind my asking why you want always left-aligned.
It's quite unusual in my experience.

¹ the old behaviour, as in 2.18.2, was to set unassociated lyrics
having manual durations as left-aligned. I always assumed it was
just an oversight awaiting correction, though I could be wrong.

Cheers,
David.