Re: Word alignment

[Peter Flynn]

On 19/01/2020 01:37, David Wright wrote:
> 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.

Thanks, I missed that somehow.

> 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.

Yes, definitely not in the Leaning Manual.

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

I'm doing this for someone who specifically requested it. In my own 
experience it's not uncommon in places like hymn books, especially where 
you have multiple lines of text per stave (verses; or in this case, 
different language translations) because the word syllable lengths per 
note can be very varied, and it makes it easier to sing from.

> 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.

I think it may be established practice in some less-common fields.

But no matter, LP triumphs again :-)

P