#2458 Remove small gaps between lyric syllables

[Anonymous]

Originally created by: *anonymous

Originally created by: janek.li...@gmail.com
Originally owned by: janek.li...@gmail.com

There should be no small, hyphen-less gaps between syllabes.  In other words, two syllabes should either be joined as if they were one string, or clearly separated with a (possibly small) hyphen.
Now some lyrics have an unspecified amount of whitespace between them, which looks neither like a space between words nor like regular gap between letters.

A proper solution would probably require applying kerning to letter pairs from two neighbor syllabes.

This issue is a part of the Lyrics Project.  See related entries:
issue 2450
issue 2451
issue 2452
issue 2453
issue 2454
issue 2455
issue 2456
issue 2457
issue 2458
issue 2459
issue 2460
issue 2461
issue 2462

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Originally posted by: PhilEHol...@googlemail.com

Gould, page 448.  "It is acceptable to omit a hyphen between a two-syllable word to save space provided that the word cannot be elided into a single syllable in error.  However, hyphens always clarify text underlay.  It is essential to divide words of more than two sylables with hyphens."

She gives an example of call-ed, where it's often pronounced while singing as two syllables, but is always a single syllable spoken.  Eliding the hyphen or space would make this distinction difficult to see.

Summary: Remove small gaps between lyric syllables

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Originally posted by: janek.li...@gmail.com

Good point!  I agree that sometimes a hyphen is necessary, "call-ed" being a good example.  However, i think that it's a separate issue.  In my opinion the unspecified amount of space is never good and we should get rid of it.  Instead, we could introduce a hard hyphen for such cases, see issue 2463.

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Originally posted by: dak@gnu.org

When there is no discernible hyphen between syllables, it might be reasonable to typeset them as one Pango string.  This might be particularly relevant in right-to-left languages: one clearly can't let a hyphen/gap gradually vanish since the singing and reading order are distinct.

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Originally posted by: janek.li...@gmail.com

Yes, typeseting "joined" syllables as one Pango string could be the right solution.  However, i don't understand your suggestion for right-to-left languages.  Since the music flows from left to right, joining two right-to-left syllables into one right-to-left string would result in having syllables under wrong notes, wouldn't it?

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Originally posted by: dak@gnu.org

Which is the point.  For R2L languages, you can't "phase out" a hyphen/gap gradually.  It either must be _clearly_ there (in which case you sing syllables left to right, while the syllables themselves are spelled right to left), or it must be clearly absent, in which case the whole word is written right to left, not just each individual syllable.

I don't have actual experience with notational practise in those languages.  For non-native singers, it is not uncommon to have a transliteration in Latin letters as well as the original text.  I think I remember that for purely Hebrew lyrics, people sometimes mirror the whole music to make it match the text direction.  That would be a different problem then.

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Originally posted by: janne.uu...@gmail.com

Is there _any_ solution, proper or improper, to this issue yet? A book I have typeset using LilyPond is going to print next week, and the editor really wants to get rid of those gaps before that. A patch, a hack, a workaround — any help would be appreciated!

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Originally posted by: perpeduu...@gmail.com

There is the "Magnetic snapping lyric syllables" snippet, see
https://github.com/openlilylib/openlilylib/tree/master/notation-snippets/lyric-syllable-magnetic-snap
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2014-03/msg00489.html

But unfortunately I could not get it working reliably, at least with 2.19.<something>, for reasons I did not understand or investigate further.  E.g., I remember situations where the same syllables were merged in one voice, but not in the other simultaneous voices.  Perhaps their distances differed in the subpoint scale, but if so it was not visible to me even on high zoom levels;  the results were inferior than without any merging.  YMMV, in particular if you only have one voice with lyrics; or maybe you can find the right tweaks to apply.  At least it's a start.

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Originally posted by: janek.li...@gmail.com

Unfortunately i don't have enough time to incorporate David's code into official LilyPond distribution soon :(  However, it would be helpful if you could post examples of what exactly didn't work as desired.

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Originally posted by: janne.uu...@gmail.com

Thank you so much for pointing me to that snippet. After minor syntactic adjustments for version 2.16.2, it worked perfectly.

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Originally posted by: janne.uu...@gmail.com

I need to take back that last word. While the snippet worked, fixing the original problem, it also introduced a new one. The hyphenation of long words (3–4 syllables or more, I think) spanning across systems was often broken in the beginning of the lower system, where hyphens and syllables got somehow tangled together. I didn't have time to scrutinize the exact conditions — whether other simultaneous voices with the same lyrics were required, for instance — but I have lots of (non-minified) examples to share (privately with Janek or whoever takes this on) if they are of any help.

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Originally posted by: janek.li...@gmail.com

It would be great if you could add a couple trimmed screenshots right to this issue, and send the code producing them to me.  Of course, it would be even greater if you could minimize at least one example :)

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Originally posted by: janne.uu...@gmail.com

I'm attaching a couple of example screenshots, and will send you the code shortly. Thanks in advance for looking into this.

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Originally posted by: simon.al...@mail.de

The most recent version of David N.s lyric word engraver may be found in the thread at <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2015-02/msg00743.html>. However I must say that I have refrained from using it a little because there were too many situations with unconvincing results. So, needs_work :-(