lyrics: syllables sometimes too narrow

Lyrics sylables are a part of the formatting criterias already. But indeed in very densly formatter scores the distance between them can be quite small, so small that even the lyrics dashes vanish. For that a fix has been implemented in the nightly builds.
But indeed some additional config option for the distance of non-dashed lyrics seems a good idea

in the master nightly for sure, I believe not in thr 2.0.3 nightly, but am not 100% sure in that.
You'd see a corresponding section in Style/General.../Sizes

IHMO the distance would need to be configurable, to be able to keep the old style, but maybe a full space would be a good default.

Currently, the minimum space between lyrics is given by the "Minimum note distance" setting in Style / General / Measure. So you already have some control over this, although it is tied to note spacing, so not an ideal solution.

In the master / nightlies, there are new options in Style / General / Sizes to specify the minimum distance for the dash, and an option to force it to always appear. The latter defaults to "on".

So as far as I can tell, this issue is resolved, unless it is still felt that forcing more space even for non-hyphenated lyrics would be good. I'm not sure most people would agree - people are constantly trying to get more music to fit pn a line, not less. You can always stretch the measure, or insert a line break a measure early, or increase minimum note distance, to get more space if you want it.

Mark, this is about the distance in absense of a -, for non-dashed lyrics

Yes, see my last paragrpah above again. I don't think most people would want MuseScore adding more space, but if you personally want more space, I gave several methods for achieving it. Perhaps a forum discussion could be started to see if people really want more space by default, and if so, we could consider changing the default from "Minimum note distance" to something else - another style setting, or the width of the space character as suggested.

Ah, I see, Minimum note distance (Defaults to 0.25sp, a quarter space) does the trick. Not very intuitive though.

I suspect that before the code to force the dash was added, it made sense to *not* force extra space between syllables, so that we could have hyphenated words dispay with no space or no dash. And that behavior is worth preserving. But I think we should probably check if a syllable is hyphenated or not, and if not,*then* we might want to force the extra space. We could indeed make it a style option, but maybe the width of a space character in the selected font really would be good enough as a minimum?

BTW, I think it's more or less just an accident that minimum note distance controls this currently. Basically, the width of the lyric is just included in the calculation of the width of the note, so the minimum note distance is just doing its normal job based on the width of the note, which includes the width of the lyric.

I gather Werner is working on a totally new note spacing algorithm that isn't so naively based on note widths but instead taken into account the full bounding box, to allow things like accidentals or dots in one voice to potentially overlap notes in another voice. This will presumably require rethinking the lyric spacing algorithm. So maybe not worth making any significant changes now.

Since, in my experience, these instances do not happen very often, I select the note that is too close, then (via inspector) add to "segment/leading space."

Last I heard, we were planning on a 2.0.3 bug fix release sooner rather than later, but new features would wait until 2.1, and the new layout might wait later still if it happens at all (could be an experiment that goes nowhere for all I know). So:

My suggestion is you start a discussion in the forum proposing we simply change the minimum space between non-hyphenated lyrics from "Minimum note distance" to whatever the width of the space character is. Make it clear that sometimes this might result in changes to existing scores where some things that formerly fit on one line would no longer fit without making manual adjustments.

If there is buy in that this is worth it, then the actual change would be easy enough to make. As I said, I haven't heard complaints about this before, whereas I do often hear people complaining it is too hard to get things to fit on one line as it is, so I am not sure you'll really find a ton of support for this idea. But if I'm wrong, I'm happy to implement it.

Actually implementing further options to control spacing does make sense, but my sense is they should probably wait until we know better what the story is with the new layout algorithms.

No change yet. Has there been much discussion on the forum yet about this? I don't recall seeing it.

So I guess my sense remains that changing this will have a negative effect on too many scores to risk doing it for 2.0.3, given there doesn't seem to be overhwleming support for the change. I do agree that one way or another this could be handled better, but I think it is something better looked at when we switch to the "new layout".

Yes, this is a separate issue - see #33246: Hyphenated melisma requires too much space. It seems likely that Werner's "newlayout" code will address this case.

Came up again in https://musescore.org/en/node/105571