Lyric Melismas
I have a situation where a long syllable is meant to be sung against two eighth notes. "As-sur-ance" is the word, and the final syllable needs to have a ____, but there isn't enough space for it to show.
I can get it to show up by highlighting the measure, going to properties, appearance, and increasing measure width, but this squashes the other measures creating new lyric issues.
I'm trying to keep the lines of the hymn each on their own stave, and moving a measure down to the next stave to make room in the current one would defeat that goal.
I only need to increase the space after the final eighth note to provide space for the extender line. How do I do that?
Thanks in advance for the help!
Comments
A textual description on its own is quite hard to follow. Why not attach your score to this thread, and tell us which measure is the problem area?
One change which you might try is to reduce the scaling of your score: Format > Page Settings... > Scaling > Stave space (reduce).
In reply to A textual description on its… by DanielR
Thanks, good suggestion. Here's a section of the piece, the issue is the word "assurance" third measure from the end, first verse. There should be an extender line on the final syllable. (According to the style we use, "When an extender line is called for, there should always be one.")
The width, height, font, etc. are set to reflect everything else in our bulletins, so I don't want to make a universal change. All I need is a little more space after the D so there's room for the extender line to appear. For example, if I highlight that D, go to "properties" --> show more --> increase "note offset" by three clicks, the extender line appears. But of course, my note head is now disconnected from the stem; I can increase the stem offset to match, but that doesn't extend the beam, and I can't figure out how to change the beam. Clicking on it gives me little handles, but they don't let me stretch it to reach the new stem placement.
I get the feeling there's a simple way to do this and I'm just not seeing what seems obvious to the programmers.
(copyright disclaimer: we have a license to put engraved music such as this in our bulletins).
In reply to Thanks, good suggestion… by Cynthia Cathcart
You could increase the leading space of the note via properties > appearance > leading, maybe combined with left alignment of the syllable.
In reply to You could increase the… by MichLeon
Brilliant! So simple, yet "appearance --> leading" is probably the last place I would have looked for the solution. Thank you. The idea of changing the alignment of the syllable is also helpful.