Re: Add prefix to lyrics

[David Kastrup]

Alexander Kobel <address@hidden> writes:

> On 2010-09-03 10:50, Dmytro O. Redchuk wrote:
>> On Fri 03 Sep 2010, 10:09 David Kastrup wrote:
>>> Obviously (to me), different character slots are required for the
>>> extensible hyphens in lyrics, and a text hyphen.  A long lyric hyphen,
>>> for example, can't have the thickness of a normal text hyphen, or you
>>> get a heavy black bar across the page.  You can't dash with a text
>>> hyphen perfectly either, because the ends of the hyphen are supposed to
>>> convey, well, ends of a hyphen and not an interruption.
>
>> I feel like i agree. Actually, what i would like to mention: using a font's
>> hyphen as a "minimally acceptable hyphen" for lyrics is, probably, bad idea 
>> (i
>> can imagine a sutiation when i need to refuse to use particular font _only_
>> because it's hyphen is too long for "minimally acceptable" lyrics hyphen "for
>> current project", let's say).
>
> I vaguely remember to have read about an option in professional
> publishing software (InDesign and Quark XPress) to allow horizontal
> scaling of glyphs for better breaks in tight layouts, like
> multi-narrow-column newspapers.  The acceptable amount was as low as
> 3% shortening and 5% lengthening of the character width or so, and
> it's deprecated if there's any other feasible option
> (increasing/decreasing whitespace); but perhaps for hyphens a bit more
> is okay, say, 10% or 15%.  I'm still aware of the fact that the hyphen
> is usually thicker than LilyPond's LyricHyphen...

That kind of adjustment would be used not just on the hyphen.  Instead
it would be used to scale all of the text in order to either obliterate
the space between syllables altogether or make space for a minimum-size
hyphen scaled the same as the text.

-- 
David Kastrup