lyrics and layout stretch

Fwiw, I would have left measure 4 alone - I rather like that it takes up less room on the page, as I'm constantly trying to find ways of saving space to fit a chart on one oage instead of two, or two instead of three. If you prefer otherwise, increasing stretch on that measure is of course already effective.

So as far as I can tell, the main issue here seems to be that you wish to be able to make a syllable span two tied notes where desired, as in measure three. This would fix that basic problem with no other manual adjustments necessary, would it not? That seems reasonable, although a bit non-standard (most publishers in my experience *do* produce spacing more like #1 than like #3 in bar 3), but I have indeed seen syllables span tied notes on occassion. You could probably fake this somehow using multiple voices, but that seems unnecessarily complex. A special character one could place under a lyric to say "ignore this note in lyric placement" would go a long ways in this case, I think.

BTW, in places where you want to pad spacing of individual notes that have lyrics, you can add invisible space characters (ctrl-space on Windows) before/after the syllable. But the second measure is interesting in that regard. Looking at published scores, I see the most way of handling this is to increase the stretch *globally* so that *all* quarter notes throughout the piece take as much space as the word "march" does here. That seems overkill, but simply increasing the stretch in that measure until the irregularity disappeared would be one solution. And I could imagine an option to MuseScore to make it automatically stretch measures in this fashion. Actually, it appears to me MuseScore already does this to some extent - it definitely increases space of all quarter notes in a measure if any one of them has a long syllable underneath. But it doesn't strive for complete regularity but rather, a sort of compromise, and that might not be enough especially when there are other staves involved.

Anyhow, I'm just brainstorming some ideas for simple solutions that might not require major changes to the spacing algorithms. Finale has a mode where handles appear on beat beat and you can drag them around to increase or decrease spacing, and it would be pretty cool to something like that some day, but I'm guessing that would be a major undertaking. So I'm wondering how effective it might be to just have a special character to ignore certain notes in lyric placement combined with an option to force stretch to be increased as necessary to create regular spacing. That plus fixing the note properties to honor negative values of leading/trailing space.

Looking at your image examples, I get the impression that you are using a monospaced font - it looks a bit like Courier but not quite.

Have you considered using a proportionally spaced font for your lyrics?

I tend to use Arial Narrow or Gill Sans MT condensed for lyrics, which give pretty good spacing ratios most of the time. I have also had good results with Calibri.

Regards
Michael

It also seems the problem with the spacing of the syllable "shore" have been brought on by what appears to be a deliberate attempt to make the syllable not be centered under the note. Had you left this note centered as it normally should be, then there would not have been so much space needed between that note and the note it is tied to. Was there a reason for doing this? And how did you do it? Leading ctrl-space characters? Might have been better to let it center the syllable, then simply drag it to the right.

Something just occurred to me - perhaps you expecting the stretch parameter to directly set the width of the measure? That's not how it works. Stretch affects the spacing between notes. So it's perfectly possible for one measure with a lesser stretch setting to end up wider than another with a greater stretch setting, if the former has more notes in it. Also, stretch settings are somewhat relative. If you are overriding the layout by putting in deliberate line breaks every four bars, then MuseScore may hae no choice but to stretch things put further. You might be thinking that you'd like to reduce stretch below 0.9 because you,d like a measure narrow, but most likely, you aren't really seeing a 0.9 stretch. Remove your linebreaks and you'll see just how unreadably tight 0.9 stretch really is. If you have a line that is fixed at four measures long, and you have a measure that you'd like to be narrower but you can,t make the stretch setting any lower, then just inceease the stretch in whatever measure(s) you want to get larger to pick up the slack.

It occurs to me another way to override measure widths might be to fill an unused vocie with invisible rests. I haven't tried, but suspct that if you want to make all measures the same width, filling them with invisible eighth or sixteenth rests would probably do the trick.