Lyrics don't always resize

• Aug 20, 2009 - 22:54
Type
Functional
Severity
S4 - Minor
Status
by design
Project

I had a hard time making this 100% reproducible with a limited number of steps. If you can't reproduce using these steps let me know but it is pretty consistent for me.

  1. Open demo score (promenade)
  2. Click to select the first note
  3. Create > Text > Lyrics
  4. Type: Hel-lo ever-y-one
  5. Press Esc to leave text editing mode
  6. Style > Edit Text Style > Lyrics odd lines
  7. Increase text size to 18pt and click "Apply" (often you will notice that the hyphen between "ever" and "y" is vertically misplaced at this point)
  8. Decrease text size to 8pt and click "OK"

Expected behavior: All lyrics syllables should be 8pt size

Actual result: Some syllables changed to 8pt others remained at 18pt.


Comments

I dit not manage to implement this in a reliable way. Style changes should apply to all "simple" text (no font changes in the text etc.) which style parameters are not changed by the user. The text element used for lyrics is quite complex and the variables "simple" and "not changed by user" are hard to determine. This also often leads to unexpected behaviour.
So i decided to make things simpler and drop this complex behaviour. Style changes in latest revision (rev. 2040) only apply to new text. If you want to change the font size of existing lyrics you first have to select them and in the text property dialog click the checkbox "apply to all selected" to change all at once.

I would much prefer that Style > Edit Text Style > Lyrics replaced any possible formatting that a single syllable might have. It is quite common that I want to change the size of all the lyric text after I have finished typing it all out. I haven't ever wanted to change the style of a single lyric syllable.

The only examples I can think of where you might want different style is on a verse-by-verse basis. For example odd and even numbered lyrics alternating between italic and normal (already supported via Edit Text Styles). The other example I can think of is multi-lingual hymns that have the text for one verse in English and text for another verse in Arabic or any other combination of languages that might require different fonts.

The "apply to all selected" method doesn't currently work because when you right-click on a syllable it deselects all syllables apart from the one you are on.