On Jun 5, 2004, at 12:22 PM, Christopher BJ Smith wrote:
Auto word extensions slow down the Mac version of 2004 something awful. Taking lyrics into account for music spacing (this has been part of Finale for a long time, I admit) sometimes gives really odd results, like if you have a long syllable like "through" on an eighth note it makes the whole measure take up way too much room.
True. Lyric spacing leaves much to be desired, but in fairness I don't think there's any obvious algorithm that would get it right. How you want to deal with a word like "through" depends a lot on the context. Yes, a really intelligent algorithm could look at that context -- eg, is there a syllable on the adjacent note -- but it would have to be pretty fancy.
Ultimately, I think this is part of the larger question of "collisions" where the horizontal extremity of a stack overlaps with the horizontal extremity of another stack, but they don't really collide since they aren't in the same vertical position. You have similar spacing issues with accidentals, articulations, etc.
That's not to say there isn't room for incremental improvements in the basic lyric spacing algorithm of course, but even within the sub-universe of lyric issues, there are other things I'd rather see addressed. I think my biggest complaint is lack of control over a hyphen. When two syllables are close but not quite touching, it's a pain in the ass to make them look good. I'd like an easier method for making the two syllables flush. Part of the problem is that the hyphen sits too far to the left. At a distance, it's no problem, but if the hyphen is in close quarters, it will be visibly off-center, which restricts how close you can put syllables before you need to make them flush with no hyphen. There's no easy way around this.
The structuring of the Lyric tool is still pretty bad, even after the changes (I think it was about 2002 or 2003, wasn't it?).
The UI for Edit Lyrics is awful. I still haven't gotten around to upgrading to 2k4, but did they ever fix that? Is it *still* impossible to zoom or size the Edit Lyrics window?
You can "lose" the syllable after a hyphen, causing endless hyphens for the rest of the piece. Click Into Score often causes repeated syllables when you use it all the way to the last measure of a piece. Avoiding Type Into Score keeps you from the bulk of the structure problems, but why doesn't it work predictably yet?
My conclusion is that what really leads to trouble is when you try to combine Type In Score techniques with Edit Lyrics techniques. If you can stick with just one or the other, you'll be OK for most things. That's why users who use either method are convinced that it is the other that is buggy.
[more Christopher, in another post]
Try adding or copying lyrics when a word has two syllables across a barline. And how do you shift syllables for the second verse without messing up the first verse? It's true that it is better than it was, but one still has to be careful, or major screw-ups can occur.
Wow, I've never even heard of this problem with shift lyrics. I use shift lyrics all the time, and it never affects another verse. Must be something to do with how your verses are set up. I think of shift lyrics as an Edit Lyrics type function, the natural companion to opt-Click Assign. I'm not sure why one would need it with Type in Score. But of course you're right that if doing so screws things up then that's a problem. I'd guess that the problem is that Type in Score isn't smart enough to recognize that a second verse is really a second verse.
Oh, and Copy Lyrics is something I never ever do. That's just begging for trouble. I have said before that I believe any Mass Copy function should create separate duplicate lyrics by default. The single most dangerous pitfall for an unwary user doing Lyrics in Finale is that he might copy a passage and then alter the lyric syllables individually using type in score, not realizing that it alters the original syllables as well. I understand why it does that, in terms of the program's fundamental logic, but it's counterintuitive to the user, and that's why the default needs to be different.
mdl
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