Mark,
Thanks for a great overview about lyric spacing. One thing you didn't
mention at all is how the rhythmic value of the note might affect
spacing, particularly if there is a long syllable on a short note
value, like "through" on a sixteenth. I seem to run into this an
awful lot, and I can NEVER get a measure with this combination in it
to look right, no matter what I do. Possibly this is because I don't
really know what takes precedence over what.
On Oct 15, 2006, at 4:46 PM, Mark D Lew wrote:
- I routinely nudged to the right any syllable ending with a comma
or period. This falls under the rubric of mathematical centering
vs visual centering. Understandably, Finale's basic algorithm is
to figure the width of the text and center it exactly. But to the
eye, the text's center of gravity is with the letters, not the
punctuation mark, so the lyric looks lopsided to the left. To my
eye, the period or comma does carry some weight, so I wouldn't
center the letters alone, either, but it's closer to that than it
is to the default.
This is analogous to chord symbol spacing as well. The Finale options
are centred or left-aligned. Centred is correct only for very short
chord symbols, like C7. Left-aligned makes a chord symbol like F#m7
look too far to the right, but centred is horrible on that. I thought
perhaps (to my eye) that the ROOT should be centred, and let the
entire suffix flow off to the right. So C in C7 would be centred,
also F# would centred at the point halfway between the left side of
the F and the right side of the sharp. Or maybe there is some other
alignment point I am missing. I am certainly not the first one to
deal with this problem.
I know Darcy Argue is constantly tweaking his chord alignments.
Darcy, if you are reading this, what do you look at when you nudge
chord symbols?
Christopher
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