Cyrillic support in lyrics

[chill319]

I am using Finale 26.3 on Windows 10. I am trying to create sheet music for a Russian song.

I have not done this before, so I may be missing something. Or not.

The text fields in the score are Cyrillic-friendly. I can paste or type Cyrillic into them without any issue.

The lyric fields, on the other hand, present Cyrillic characters as spaces, and this is true whether or not one has selected a Cyrillic font. The result, for me, has been a rather embarrassing inability to fulfill a professional contract.

I can't believe I am the first person to want to use Finale to set a song with Russian lyrics.

Please tell me what I'm missing, or what the workaround is, or whether I should switch to Sibelius, which easily handles Cyrillic lyrics.

Thanks!

[David Ward]

EDITED: I see you are on Windows. I've just tried typing Russian Cyrillic using Lyrics>Type into Score with Finale 26.3 and Mac 10.14.6 (Mojave). It works fine for me. I suspect it should work just as well on Windows. Could it be something to do with your choice of Lyrics font? The screenshot is with Adobe Garamond Pro, but it works just as easily with Finale Lyrics.

You refer to the fact that this happens even when you use a ‘Cyrilic font’, so it's probably nothing to do with your choice of Lyrics font. Just possibly, it might be connected with your method of entering the lyrics. Does it happen with ‘Type into Score’? Since it's so easy on a Mac, I'd be very surprised if it isn't just as easy on Windows.

[miker]

I have done lyrics in Russian, Hebrew, Tuvaluan (that’s just English, though…)

Like David, I’m on a Mac.

[Peter Thomsen]

… The text fields in the score are Cyrillic-friendly. I can paste or type Cyrillic into them without any issue.

The lyric fields, on the other hand, present Cyrillic characters as spaces, and this is true whether or not one has selected a Cyrillic font …

Not enough info.

Finale v26 supports Unicode fonts.
Are you using a Unicode font for the Cyrillic characters?

If you are using an older non-Unicode font, then I think that you must choose the right script in the Font dialog box.

… this is true whether or not one has selected a Cyrillic font …

Please specify where you have “selected a Cyrillic font”.
- was it perhaps in {Document Options - Fonts} ?

By The Way:
I, too, am using Mac Finale.

Hopefully a Windows user will chime in soon.

[chill319]

Thank you, David, for your reply. The platform I am using is a 2021 Dell laptop that came with Windows 10. As mentioned in my original post, when I type or paste directly into Text areas, Cyrillic shows up just the same as Roman. When I type or paste directly into Lyrics, whether into the Lyrics "textbox" or directly under the vocal line notes, every Cyrillic character appears as a space.

I can only guess that the code for Windows is not identical with the code for Apple, which you folks prefer. I come from a different programming world (financial services) and am not Apple oriented.

Thank you also everyone else who has responded from an Apple platform. Glad to know Cyrillic works there.

Being a programmer by profession myself, I get the feeling that whoever did the code for Lyrics on Windows didn't support fonts the way coder/s for Text areas supported fonts. The proof would seem to be in the pudding. Unfortunately. that in turn would seem to suggest that the code for Finale is (at least in some modules) not object oriented -- hard to believe in the third decade of the 21st century, and hopefully not the case.

Hopefully, someone else who responds to this Forum uses Finale for Windows.

[Peter Thomsen]

chill319,

Did you try the suggestions in my post?

I am using Mac Finale, but my suggestions are pasted from replies by Win Finale users.

[wessmusic]

Finale even from its earliest versions supports Cyrillic on Windows, but with serious proviso and so on until the 2011 version inclusive. In the 2012 version the unicode system was implemented and the troubles in this direction were overcome.

Well, almost...

I work on a Mac myself, but when I teach my students at Sofia University, I use version 26.3 for PC.
OT: I assume that few people know that the university is named after "St. Kliment Ohridski" - one of the two bookmen, the other is St. Naum from Ohrid, who created this alphabet. BTW, it is called Cyrillic because it is dedicated to their spiritual teachers St. Cyril Slavic-Bulgarian and St. Methodius Moravski. For unknown reasons, many mistakenly consider this alphabet to be Russian, although its creation was commissioned specifically for the Preslav Literary School in the early tenth century by the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon the Great.

Version 26.3 (probably the same as in the older ones) for Windows has a minor problem, which manifests itself in exactly the way chill319 described it — instead of letters, spaces are written.
(I want to note that the Mac version does not have such a problem, and although the Cyrillic letters are missing, the OS replaces them with one of the system fonts.)

When we resort to using Lyrics Tool, the default text font is "Finale Lyrics 12".



This is a simple font with 277 glyphs, which, as can be seen from the font chart,



does not contain the standard UNICODE space even for basic Cyrillic — from U-0410 to U-044F.
___________

The solution is easy and there are two main methods to overcome the problem described above.

A. go to Document menu, Document Options, and then in Fonts set the appropriate font for Lyrics.
(First make sure that it supports Cyrillic. For example, "Times New Roman".)



B. In the Lyrics Window (first bar from Lyrics menu) we write a few letters in Latin (in fact, one letter is enough), then select these letter(s) and choose the appropriate font from Text menu. Switch to Cyrillic (recommended
is to use the phonetic version, as almost all characters are transliterated from Latin) and add a few letters in Cyrillic. Delete the first Latin letter(s) and continue with the text entry.
Note that if there is no text in the Lyrics Window field, the program does not accept the setting of the new font and returns "Finale lyrics" font.

I hope this helps.

[chill319]

Thank you so much for taking the time to provide such a detailed, knowledgeable answer! I'm out of town today, but I can't wait to try out the two workarounds you give. I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks again!

[chill319]

This is a further response to wessmusic's expert discussion of handling Cyrillic lyrics in Finale 26 for Windows.

As one might expect from the level of detail in wessmusic's response, his workaround is spot on.

Here is the first bar of a song in which I followed his advice.

So far, so good. But it turns out that Finale 26 for WIndows is not ready for prime time once you use a Cyrillic font for lyrics. Specifically, keyboard shortcuts do not work as intended. For someone who started using Finale in the 1990s, this is a bit ironic. And it no doubt amuses the Finale for Apple super-users, who are happy to show Windows doofuses like me how MakeMusic programs Finale correctly for Apple users.

In any event, keyboard shortcuts in Windows do not work as intended when Cyrillic lyrics are present. My first intimation of this was when I discovered that you can no longer highlight beamed notes and use arrow keys to move them to a different staff. (Yes, note mover still works, but as everyone knows, that requires multiple passes to get the same end result. It takes, maybe, 8 times longer to do the same thing.)

As an illustration of how fundamental the disfunction goes, here is the result of the same bar after the stem has been flipped with the L key:

finale-cyrillic-m1-after.jpg (25.23 KiB) Viewed 1252 times

This is just scratching the surface. But it is sufficient to demonstrate that Finale 26.3 for Windows is not ready for prime time. Finale 27 for Windows requires Windows 11 to work correctly, and Windows 11 is far from being "just another upgrade."