Hector Martin

Is there a sane way of splitting English words into syllables for karaoke, or should I just flip a table? Hyphenation rules say 'un-com-fort-able', but the pronunciation is 'uhn-kuhmf-tuh-buhl'. The 'or' disappears. I have 'un-comfor-ta-ble' but...

The approaches I've seen are: 1. Do it like hyphenation rules / dictionaries say 2. Just do whatever (for instance, try to follow pronunciation except when it comes to common prefixes like -ing) 3. Try to follow pronunciation always And I don't know if I prefer one of them...

Some especially annoying things with hyphenation rules are: 1. Some necessary splits aren't actually allowed by the rules 2. Sometimes there's a noticeable pause between syllables and then you can clearly hear that the pronunciation doesn't match the rules

I got used to "proper" hyphenation rules for lyrics because of the Rock Band games, but when you're not displaying the lyrics syllable by syllable like Rock Band (optionally) does, I'm not sure if there's actually any advantage to it But at the same time, is it worse?

So the thing is BlitzLoop uses scrolling text, and has its own (rather dumb) heuristic that works most of the time by default, but does things like "not-hing". But you can't tell when it's smoothly scrolled. You can override it but most of the time I don't notice.

But now I'm exporting from BlitzLoop to ASS to YTT in a style that highlights each syllable as a unit, and now the splits are a lot more obvious... and I'm not sure what I want to do.