Setting minimum width between non-hyphenated lyrics to size of space character
As sometimes I prepare songs for presentation, I try to do the same song with different strophes in the same space, normally on one page DIN A5 landscape.
A problem that arose: Between non-hyphenated lyrics sometimes, especially with shorter notes as eights, given a quarter metrum, the width is becoming too narrow in some places, so that the readability of the lyrics is suffering. In the above mentioned case that occurs nearly in every strophe at least once.
I know, that I could fix that by adding a fixed space before the beginning of a word, that follows on the short note, or by enlargening the minimum width between notes.
But the latter will have the negative side effect, that the whole song will be stretched.
It would be good, if musescore would have a minimum width between non-hyphenated lyrics in the size of a space character. A space normally is the width, that should be at least between two words to guarantee good readability.
It is possible, that this sometimes might also result in changes to existing scores where some things that formerly fit on one line would no longer fit without making manual adjustments, but I think such problems probably will not really occur often and will not outweigh the great improvement that it is not necessary to manually adjust these things.
You would not have to think about that anymore!
And most probable such a parameter would even help to pack pieces more narrow without loosing readability!
I think this is a thing that could (and should) be done by the software.
Comments
See #94331: lyrics: syllables sometimes too narrow
In reply to See #94331: lyrics: syllables by Jojo-Schmitz
Hi Jojo-Schmitz, Marc Sabatella wrote in the thread you mention, that I should discuss this on the forum. Should I use another group?
In reply to Hi Jojo-Schmitz, Marc by MLutz
No, this is a good place. But others interested in participating in this discussion might benefit from seeing the issue thread that led to this. Especially, perhaps, the bit about the possibility of a new style setting and why maybe now isn't the best time to take that step.
FWIW, I would expect a pretty sizable number of scroes would see visible changes in terms of something thjat formerly fit on one line not fitting any more. Tough to guess, but I'd surprised if it turned out to be less than say 20% of all pages with lyrics.
The degree to which the current behavior seems problematic also depends in part on the size of your lyrics. When using standard text styles, a space character isn't *that* much wider than the current minimum distance. But if you have changed your text style to use very large font, then the default minimum space will indeed look unusually small.
In reply to No, this is a good place. by Marc Sabatella
OK, thanks for your answer.
It is true, that the problems also have to do with the size of the lyric font. With a bigger font the width between words is smaller in relation to the font size.
Therefore it would be good to have a width that will relate to the size of the fonts.
Yesterday I tested the song, where I noticed these problems with the default options. Even then I had to increase the minimal note distance to 0.50sp to have the width of a space guaranteed. So it is even a problem (I admit, a slighter problem) for small font sizes, and probably even the width of a space is a little bit to small:
As the words in lyrics are stretched, the width between words should probably even be a little bit wider than a space to have a good readability.
I also tried to include manually spaces before the words that are too narrow to the word before. That changed nothing in the over all layout, but gave a much nicer view.
So it would be a good thing to watch this distance automatically -
if that feature cannot be added now, maybe later?
In reply to OK, thanks for your by MLutz
I do already have a trial implementation, based on the width of the space character, it's quite simple to do. Maybe it would make sense for people who have concerns one way or the other to post some sample score here along with the an image showing how certain passages look in a current nightly build (which is likely to be different from 2.0.2 because of font rendering changes made since then), and I can then show how it looks in my build, and comment on whether any systems fit fewer measures than before. Then people could better judge.
In reply to I do already have a trial by Marc Sabatella
Oh, that's fine! I attach here 4 versions of the same song. One is the default, where there are some only slightly problematic places. Then I compressed it once, to have it on 2 pages (text_default1). And with the last I have enlargened the size of font to 13 and compressed it once to also have 2 pages (here there are many places with too small width (text_default13). And I also added the presentation version, even now with size 14.
![Text_default13.png]( "Text_default13.png")
2 screenshots from Text_default13
and the presentation version
![EG449-page2.png]( "EG449-page2.png")