Finale Forum

Hello,

I'm attempting to put some old church music into modern notation. I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this. I've made a little progress, but I'm having trouble with the spacing of the words.
When one note has several words, I input the words in finale attached to shorter notes. I then hide all but the first note in the string, and change the notehead and stem so it looks like a long note. Maybe there is a better way to do this, I don't know.

Anyway, my question is about how to fix the spacing of the words. I attached an example.
On the first line, you can see that there is too much space between 'together' and 'all', and too much space between 'unto' and 'God'.
On the second line, I only used eighth notes, but the spacing is still not good. There is too much spacing around 'is', and 'and' is too close to 'high'.
Basically, I want the words to be spaced normally, and the note spacing to adjust to the word lengths. Right now, finale chooses the note spacing, and adjusts the word spacing to the notes.

Is this something finale is able to do?

Thank you.

Finale 25.2
Mac

rjawad1 wrote:When one note has several words, I input the words in finale attached to shorter notes. I then hide all but the first note in the string, and change the notehead and stem so it looks like a long note. Maybe there is a better way to do this, I don't know.

There is a better way. Use a "hard space" (option/space) between all words that appear beneath a single note.

N.

Thank you for the help. I tried your suggestion, and it does look better. However, now the note is centered above the group of words. I would like the note to come right at the beginning of the group of words. In the attached picture, I want the long note to be above 'your' and not above 'hands'.
Is there some kind of 'left justify' option?

I would go to Special Tools > Note Position Tool. Click in the measure and move the handle that appears so the D is aligned where you want it.

N.

Lyric Tool > Adjust Syllables, then right-click on the anchor point for each syllable, and adjust the Alignment.

Nice! Thank you. I think that basically does what I want.

There is an option as to whether to center the notes and lyrics that I think is on by default. You might try turning that off.

Yes, thank you. That is what I was looking for.