lyrics extender lines until the end of the last note of the melisma

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

Hi all!
Thanks a lot for your help so far! All the scores that are no longer protected 
by copyright, will be made available on the CPDL, so you are supporting not 
only me personally, but the whole world.


Now, my problem with lyrics extender lines:

Extender lines over melismata in lyrics usually last until the last note of 
the melisma. Normally, this is sufficient to indicate to the singer how long 
to hold a given note. However, when the last note is a very long note and 
other voices sing many notes during it, it is extremely important that the 
singers hold the melisma exactly. For this reason, in several printed scores 
the extender lines are then extended to the end of last note of the melisma 
to indicate how long to sing the note. 

As an example, take the attached trivial snipplet. Soprano needs to hold the c 
for six beats, but the extender line is much shorter, thus some sopranos 
might be tempted to stop that note earlier! 

How can I make the extender line really last until the end of the melisma (in 
this case until the 12th \"la\" of the altos?
Even worse are the second two measures of the example: The extender for the 
altos lasts way longer as the one for the sopranos, although both should sing 
until exactly the same beat...

I looked at the lilypond internals documentation, but neither the 
Extender_engraver nor the LyricExtender seem to have any property to change 
this.

Thanks a lot,
Reinhold
-- 
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Reinhold Kainhofer, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
email: address@hidden, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial and Actuarial Mathematics, TU Wien, http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/
 * K Desktop Environment, http://www.kde.org, KOrganizer maintainer
 * Chorvereinigung "Jung-Wien", http://www.jung-wien.at/

extender_line.ly
Description: Text document

extender_line.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document