Text entry
Text entry of text that needs to be aligned to the music can be done in a few ways.
For a single word (indications such as dolce ) use one of the keys for musical directions:
| <h> | music directions 1 (tempo related) |
| <i> | music directions 2 (dynamics) |
| <j> | music directions 3 (score markers) |
| <k> | music directions 4 (instrument specifics like arco ) |
Similarly, you can also use a key for lyrics that must be written with the notes for individual words:
| <[> | Lyrics 1 |
| <]> | Lyrics 2 |
| <{> | Lyrics 3 |
| <}> | Lyrics 4 |
In lyrics you can use diacritics as well as other alphabets (greek, cyrillic etc).
Chord symbols and dynamics signs are also text types that are treated similarly as far as MusiCAD is concerned.
You can individually move, enlarge and reduce individual text objects. You can also position all texts of a certain type differently at once by changing the properties of that text type
Text that begins with a square bracket will be displayed by MusiCAD with a frame around it. Score markers are a good example of this.
If you are going to enter complete lyrics, it is probably better to set text input mode to the relevant text type.
Each letter you type produces the text input screen with the typed letter in it. At the end of a word (or part of it) you type <Enter> and the text is placed at the note and the cursor moves to the next note. Everything is then ready for the next word to be entered. Alignment of text is based on note position. If notes are too close together or the text uses (too) large letters, words may overlap.
The note spacing and position may differ in the editing screen from the final position on the page. Therefore, enter the entire text first, and only make corrections afterwards to prevent overlapping texts.
To avoid text overlap you can do a number of things:
- check [note-text alignment] for the relevant text type;
- make sure that [White after text] has a value greater than zero, after every text (of the same text type) the filled in white space is now reserved so that successive texts will no longer be written over each other.
- Change the format by spacing all notes further (increase minimum note spacing)
- Choose Smaller or narrower font for the text.
- Optionally, individual closely spaced notes (with text) can be moved apart manually (note to the right shift with <alt-
>).
