Formatting Lyrics Temporarily

We typically add symbols to each line of lyrics to help the audience distinguish lyrics from other chatter in the chat window.

You can do this permanently, by adding those symbols to each line of the lyrics before you enter the lyrics into Poetical. Here is a link to an article I wrote that explains how to do that.

However, you can also add symbols to lyrics temporarily after the lyrics are already in Poetical, by following these steps:

1. Open Poetical
2. Click on “Settings” button
3. Add a symbol (or multiple symbols) in the “Default Prefix” textbox
4.  Press the “Save” button

At this point, your lyrics will be prefixed by the symbols that you placed in the “Default Prefix” textbox.

If you want to later remove those temporary symbols, simply follow steps 1-4 again, but this time, at step 3, put blank text into the ”Default Prefix” textbox.

What symbols should you use?

Probably the simplest way of adding symbols to your lyrics is to just use a tilde character followed by a space as the prefix; if you do this, your lyrics will change from something like this:

                Over the hills and far away

to this:

                ~ Over the hills and far away

However there are many other interesting graphic characters you can add to your lyrics by using alt codes; here is a list of some of them:

Bullet(•)                       ALT+7

Heart(♥)                      ALT+3

Diamond(♦)                ALT+4

Empty Bullet(○)          ALT+9

Single note(♪)             ALT+13

Double note(♫)          ALT+14

Be aware that, while all these graphic characters will show up in chat bubbles, not all of these symbols show up in the chat window; in particular the single and double notes will each appear as a ‘?’ character in the chat window (which is why many people don’t use the note symbols, but choose some other symbol instead, but the choice is yours).

You can make these graphic characters appear by doing the following:

• First, turn on the Numlock key
• Then, hold down the ALT key while typing the appropriate number on the numeric keypad of your keyboard

For example, to make each line of lyrics start with ~• , you would type into the Default Prefix textbox the following characters: a tilde, the alt code for the bullet (ALT+7), and finally a space character (and then press the “Save” button).

Actually, this hack Briallan mentions adds symbols in front of every single non-commented (active) line of every lyrical file in Poetical. 

If one wishes to make alterations only to a specific file in Poetical  (rather than all) then do this:

Open Poetical.

Choose the lyrical file you wish to apply symbols to its active lines.

Click Edit.

At the top of the window, in the Default Prefix section, the 'Use Command:' is already selected with a blank box next to it. 

Keep it selected, and write your desired symbol into the box. 

Click Save at the bottom of the window, to close it. 

All non-commented (active) lines in that lyrical file will now have the new symbol at the front.

Also a tip: When you add a new symbol, add a space afterwards as well in the box so that (assuming your desired symbol was ~) your lyrics look like this:

~ I left to go to Moria... 

and not like this:

~I left to go to Moria...

Making changes within one file only as opposed to all files in Poetical is useful if you already have other symbols applied to some other lyrics files in Poetical which differ from the one you wish to apply to this one or because you copied some lyrics from a Word document which already contained other symbols; that sort of thing. Making global changes would not be desirable in such cases.