LilyPond scansion

This software helps writing lyrics in lilypond. Given some text and a language it will:

1. Break all words into syllables, separating them with double hyphens;
2. Escape existing single hyphens with a backslash.

This is useful for aligning lyrics with music in a \lyricmode block, but is not sufficient. Melismas and elisions should be handled manually. For more information on aligning lyrics and music with lilypond, see this documentation page╜.

This page relies on a python script which you can also download here╩ (in order to, for example, integrate the script with your text editor).

Tips for vim users◾

If you download this script you could, naturally, define some shortcut (say, <leader>-l) to apply the script to a visual selection:

autocmd FileType lilypond vnoremap <Leader>l :!python /path/to/lyrics2ly.py<Enter>

Other lilypond configuration snippet I find very useful for writing lyrics is binding ctrl-space to insert double hyphens:

autocmd FileType lilypond inoremap <C-@> <Space>--<Space>
autocmd FileType lilypond nnoremap <C-@> a<Space>--<Space><Esc>l