Michael,

No, this doesn't work in many situations, namely when you have tied notes. It pretends that the second of two tied notes is not taken into account for the lyrics, but then it also doesn't take the THIRD note into account! See my example.

Michael,

This avoid collision option does not always seem to work, especially if one sets lyrics to 14 point Finale Lyric Font instead of 12 point.

Nor does it account for the extra space needed for a word extension, with tied or slurred notes. I often have to manually adjust the beat spacing to get this to happen, or put too few measures on the staff.

Hi Christopher, Adrian, and Mike.

Thanks for the picture Christopher. I've added this to the story around further improvements to the lyric spacing (FIN-3819). 

Adrian: Can you provide an example? I've tried a few things and the lyrics don't collide.

Mike: I'm not sure how to interpret your request. Do you mean that if the lyrics are too long the w.e. isn't forced to appear on a tie, as in "community" in my example. Or are there scenarios where collisions will occur when w.e. are present? 

Looking forward to clarifying your requests

Cheers,

Michael Johnson

VP, Professional Notation

MakeMusic

Michael,

I do not have a project in process at the moment where such problems might occur, and those that have, I have long since corrected manually and moved on past where my memory will help me find them. When the problem recurs, if it does, I will open a case and forward the file to MM_Support and let you know.

What Adrian said. I just correct them and move on.

I will say that changing the doc option to center words with word extensions, rather than left-justify, can help.

Sounds good Adrian. When you submit the case, feel free to mention me and this thread. I'd love to add details of your bug to the story FIN-3819

Cheers,

Michael Johnson

VP, Professional Notation

MakeMusic

Mike:

The next time it happens, please post to this thread or open a case and mention me. Thank you for your time and commitment to high-quality notation.

Cheers,

Michael Johnson

VP, Professional Notation

MakeMusic

Hi Michael,

This issue is one that I have been trying to get MakeMusic to address for years now, and I've got the case numbers to prove it. The problem began with Finale 2011 and hasn't been repaired since. If you were to input Christopher's example into any version of Finale 2010 and prior, that particular collision would not occur. The problem occurs whenever there is a long syllable that requires either a word extension or a hyphen, and that syllable is followed by a note (or rest) that doesn't have a syllable attached. Finale no longer accounts for any "lyrical space" with the "un-lyricised" note or rest. (Sorry for all the quotation marks; I think I'm inventing words to describe this problem LOL) It becomes a nightmare for me, as a large portion of my business is professional choral music engraving and editing. Prior to Finale 2011, the automatic spacing worked great for this issue, but no longer.

A similar issue is this: if I have a long syllable on beat 3 (in common time), followed by a rest, Finale treats the syllable on beat 3 as though it needs a word extension, and justifies it to the left. It does not need a word extension, therefore it should stay centered. This issue becomes pronounced if beat 3 is followed by a rest and then more notes in beat 4, as shown in the example below.

Thanks for looking at this; I REALLY hope this issue might be resolved soon.

Bradley Knight

Based on the subsequent comments, I've changed this thread from "Completed" to "Answered". We won't be adding an "Apply Lyric Spacing to Selected Part/Score" option, but we will be working on improvements to Lyrics spacing.

Cheers,

Michael Johnson

VP, Professional Notation

MakeMusic

I guess that's the best we can hope for. Any idea of a timeline? Is it at the top of the list? The bottom?

Hi Mike:

As you may have noticed, I've refrained from setting timelines for any future work on this community as there are too many variables and any dart on something that resembled a calendar would only cause consternation. I can say this area of the code is in the top 1/3 of the backlog. 

Cheers,

Michael Johnson

VP, Professional Notation

MakeMusic

Fin27 Win10Pro   Finale Lyrics 12 plain
I've tried a multitude of recommendations found on the web (including above). Each shifts only slightly.

Please help advise...  (and thank you!!)

Five years since this post and no solutions. *Sigh*

Someone responded about moving measures to the next line (Select stack, and down-arrow).  Easy. It works now.  Thank you

(I wish it had that tip in the MakeMusic help/manual)

I noticed that the "Insert Hard Space" command (while the Lyric tool is selected, in the top menu bar: Text --> Insert Hard Space) helps the issue of lyric collisions between rests and tied notes. On Windows, the shortcut is ctrl+space so you don't have to navigate through a menu each time.

I think the problem is that if there's no lyric on a rest or tied note, Finale sees it as a gap between lyrics; it checks spacing within sets of lyrics, but doesn't check for spacing with the last note of one lyric set and the first lyric of the next. So if there's long syllables on either side of that rest / tied note, it can get really cramped. But, if you insert a "hard space", Finale now sees that empty slot as a syllable, so it properly spaces the syllables around it.

I had to come up with this "Insert Hard Space" solution myself after searching for an answer for quite some time among the manual and the forums and finding nothing that worked, as did a lot of you above. As far as I can tell, there's no way to make this a default option that Finale can apply automatically. It seems the best option is to manually insert the hard space any time there is a rest or tied note without a syllable.

Pictured below: Upper image is the default. Lower image is after inserting hard spaces on the rests. (Why is the upper image the default?? It looks so ugly. I'm glad I have a solution now, but I hope they fix the default for other users experiencing the same frustration.)