I've discovered a number of threads on this topic (how lyrics don't work when you use such as <<{a' b'} \\ { c' d'}>>. I didn't seem to have trouble with lyrics in my early days of trying this . . . (but, maybe then I was just focusing on the music, before putting the lyrics in; whatever the case, I ended up not using them for another reason). Anyway, I've come across a situation where I needed to have this (i.e. stem directions pointing different ways on the same note, only a few times). So . . . I looked through the LilyPond discussion and found various things, none of which in and of themselves provided a satisfactory solution (although they helped me come up with what follows).
Anyway, I found a way that works better for me (although it requires adjusting if you need to change the system width). I did, however, discover a solution. Basically, I just used underscores to make one word look like two, and I re-aligned the lyrics to make them shift over in the right direction. This makes it look fine (although it would be nice if they made some way to have differing stem directions in the same chord without having multiple voices, on a chord by chord basis, rather than all of them that follow). So, here's the code: In the lyrics area: \once \override Score . LyricText #'self-alignment-X = #-1 I________am \skip 1 (the skip is for the note without lyrics; 'am' overlaps onto it so it looks like it belongs there; the number of underscores may vary significantly, and also the integer assigned with the override up there, depending on the direction it needs to shift: i.e. -1, 1, 0, etc.) Here's the note code I used for the spot to put the lyrics over: <<{f'4.} \\ {f'4.}>> It takes a little tweaking, but it works better and faster than anything else I've tried (it's not always practical to have multiple voices, especially when your number of staffs changes in the middle of the song, at least in certain ways, and you only want one midi for the song). Anyway, this is just a tip for those needing a solution to this, since there are many I've seen asking the question. I don't suppose they're planning to make a more standard solution, yet, are they? I would personally suggest just adding a tweak to chords (rather than messings with voices) to add the ability to make the stems go in opposing directions (it's not the durations that matter so much). Something simple like this: <\stemUp f' \stemDown f'>4 or <\stemUp c'' a' \stemDown f'> (This would signify that both c'' and a' were up, on the same stem, and only f' was down. Making it so multiple up stems appeared would be bad, I think, in a chord context like this. I don't think the middle notes should be able to go against both the top and the bottom, in this context.) _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user