Re: Add prefix to lyrics

[Alexander Kobel]

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...

To make this clear:  I'm not trying to push the scaling, but I'm just 
thinking about what might be the established practice in typesetting.


Cheers,
Alexander