Problems with automatic placement of lyrics

• Jan 13, 2019 - 19:33

I notate music that has two voices per staff, one with lyrics below the staff and one with lyrics above. In previous versions of musescore I had to manually enter a large vertical offset to get the top voice's lyrics above the staff, so I am grateful for the inclusion of above-the-staff lyric placement in musescore 3. However, the automatic placement of lyrics is causing me problems. Here's the issue:

-The automatic placement of lyrics above the staff is not properly avoiding overlap between a melisma and a slur (and is also not avoiding overlap between a melisma and a stem, it appears). See here: https://imgur.com/7yE4Hbc
-I cannot override the vertical offset of the automatic placement through manual adjustment without turning automatic placement off entirely
-When automatic placement is turned off, not only does the height of the lyrics not adjust automatically, the horizontal placement of the lyrics does not adjust. In previous versions of musescore, the lyrics would always force the measure to widen in order to accommodate the length of words, but with automatic placement turned off in musescore 3, that adjustment is removed along with the vertical adjustment, leaving the measures spaced as if there are no lyrics at all. This causes tons of overlap of words under the default layout stretch, and increasing the layout stretch doesn't even work properly because it's only taking into account the notes in the measure rather than the words, leaving some measures drastically overstretched before words stop overlapping in other measures.

The features that are needed to solve this issue are:
-automatic placement of lyrics that properly avoids all overlaps between words, melismas, dashes and all notes, stems, lines, etc. that are part of the staff and should be completely under/over lyrics
-AND/OR the ability to separately toggle horizontal and vertical automatic placement of lyrics, so one can manually adjust their position without the program forgetting that words take up horizontal space, as one could do in previous versions of musescore.


Comments

A reason why it's harder to adjust the vertical position of a single lyric is that MuseScore is trying to align things vertically. You'd have to disable that in Format / Style (set "Vertical align range" to "Segment") to get that to work as expected. I consider that at least partially a bug - it should be possible to move a single lyric further from the staff even with the align range set to system, and then other lyrics should follow.

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