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Text scripts

Simple “quoted text” indications may be added to a score, as demonstrated in the following example. Such indications may be manually placed above or below the staff, using the syntax described in Direction and placement.

     
     a8^"pizz." g f e a4-"scherz." f

[image of music]

This syntax is actually a shorthand; more complex text formatting may be added to a note by explicitly using a \markup block, as described in Formatting text.

     
     a8^\markup { \italic pizz. } g f e
     a4_\markup { \tiny scherz. \bold molto } f

[image of music]

By default, text indications do not influence the note spacing. However, their widths can be taken into account: in the following example, the first text string does not affect spacing, whereas the second one does.

     
     a8^"pizz." g f e
     \textLengthOn
     a4_"scherzando" f

[image of music]

Predefined commands

\textLengthOn, \textLengthOff.

See also

Notation Reference: Formatting text, Direction and placement.

Snippets: Text.

Internals Reference: TextScript.

Known issues and warnings

Checking to make sure that text scripts and lyrics are within the margins is a relatively large computational task. To speed up processing, LilyPond does not perform such calculations by default; to enable it, use

\override Score.PaperColumn #'keep-inside-line = ##t

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