Re: Minimal horizontal space for melismata

[Kevin Barry]

Hi Peter,

On Tue, 24 Mar 2020 at 15:06, Peter Crighton <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> Hello all,
>
> I want the lyrics to be absolutely free of melismatic hyphens. How can I make 
> sure of that? I have ensured that the note heads take as little space as they 
> can (to my knowledge), but if it is either a short syllable and/or a long 
> melisma, the note heads still take up too much space, so hyphens appear. See 
> example below.

You could try using underscores instead of hyphens so that the lyrics
are always tied to the first note and won't be split up. E.g., in your
example, use:
%%
Lyric = \lyricmode {
  Lorem _ ipsum _ dolor _ sit amet. _
}
%%
instead of using two hyphens (you need to add an underscore for every
syllable after the first - see the section "Multiple notes to one
syllable" in the docs for the details). If LilyPond ends up adding
trailing hyphens to words with lots of syllables (I couldn't make it
do this while fooling around with your example though) you can always
\omit the LyricHyphen.

Kevin