**vdata: for general text display as lyric text in music notation.

The **vdata data type is used to display arbitrary textual data in music notation as if it were musical lyrics. The name is short for “verse-like data”. Here is a basic example:

Notice that the letters f, h and k are missing, since the notation renderer, verovio, cannot attach lyrics to rests and cannot display lyrics where there is no note (see the **cdata data type for doing that).

Differences from **text

The **text data format is used to encode lyrics in Humdrum syntax. This represention maps spaces in the data contents to elision characters, while **vdata text preserves the space in the rendered notation:

Multiple lines of data

Multiple lines of data can be given as separate **vdata spines. The spines will be attached to the staff created by the first **kern spine found to the left of the **vdata spines:

SVG labeling of data

The true data type of **vdata data can be given by adding a hyphen after **vdata and then the name of the actual data type. This will cause the text in the rendered SVG image of the notation to be labeled with a class name based on the data type, and this can then be manipulated by CSS, such as to highlight different text data types in difference colors:

If you inspect the SVG image of the notation, you will see that the text content includes class labels based on the data type given after the dash in the **vdata spines, such as this SVG code for displaying the number 3, where there is a number class added to the first line. The other classname, syl, is a classname added by verovio to indicate that the graphic element is a text syllable:

<g class="syl number" id="syl-L7F3">
   <text x="3403" y="2337" font-size="0px">
      <tspan class="text" id="text-0000000746016912">
         <tspan font-size="405px" class="text">&nbsp;3</tspan>
      </tspan>
   </text>
</g>

The text coloring and font changes are done with the following CSS code:

svg .letter {
	fill: chartreuse;
  	text-shadow: 0px 0px 10px orange;
}

svg .number {
	fill: hotpink;
	font-family: Helvetica;
	font-weight: bold;
}