GNU LilyPond

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Node:Lyrics mode definition, Next:American Chords, Up:Refman appendix

Lyrics mode definition

The definition of lyrics mode is ludicrous, and this will remain so until the authors of LilyPond acquire a deeper understanding of character encoding, or someone else steps up to fix this.

A word in Lyrics mode begins with: an alphabetic character, _, ?, !, :, ', the control characters ^A through ^F, ^Q through ^W, ^Y, ^^, any 8-bit character with ASCII code over 127, or a two-character combination of a backslash followed by one of `, ', ", or ^.

Subsequent characters of a word can be any character that is not a digit and not white space. One important consequence of this is that a word can end with `}', which may be confusing. However, LilyPond will issue a warning. Any _ character which appears in an unquoted word is converted to a space. This provides a mechanism for introducing spaces into words without using quotes. Quoted words can also be used in Lyrics mode to specify words that cannot be written with the above rules.

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Copyright (c) 1997--2001 Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.

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