"Karaoke" window seems to ignore hyphens in label track

Hi,
It seems that the karaoke view in Audacity 3.0.2 ignores hyphens in the label track.
Tested with 3.0.2 and 2.5.2, Windows 10 Pro and Manjaro.

According to the manual (Karaoke - Audacity Manual) it’s supposed to remove the spacing between the labels, such as “Aud-” “a-” “ci-” “ty” is shown as a single word, but the “ball” jumps according to the syllables:

You may want to split up lyrics such that the ball bounces per syllable rather than just for the whole word.
To do this, create a label for each syllable, and end each with a hyphen (“-”), except the last syllable.
For example, “Aud-” “a-” “ci-” “ty”.
The hyphen tells Audacity to not put a space between the syllables, as it does between words. Note there may still be space between the syllables, depending on how far apart they are in the timeline and the size of the Karaoke window.

What’s actually happening is that the labels are rather shown as-typed, aka “Aud-” “a-” “ci-” “ty” is shown as “Aud- a- ci- ty” instead of “Audacity”.
Example where I’m trying to add lyrics to Auld Lang Syne:


I’ve tried moving the labels around, changing their duration and spacing, and tried making a new project to see if it was an issue with that specific project but nothing seems to make Audacity do as documented.

The documentation notes that:

there may still be space between the syllables, depending on how far apart they are in the timeline and the size of the Karaoke window.

However I’ve tried resizing the window, different aspect ratios, changing the gap between labels between milliseconds, no gap, seconds and minutes, but nothing seems to produce the expected result.

Does anyone have any idea how to fix this?

I agree. I seem to be having the same difficulty on Windows 10.

I’ve tested some versions all the way back to 1.3.11, due to the lack of release notes mentioning when karaoke mode was added.
1.3.11 was the oldest version I was able to locate that included this feature, and the karaoke mode did not care for the hyphens at all in that version either.

Unsure at this point if it is actually an issue with audacity, and not some 3rd party lib/system that the karaoke feature relies on.

This looks like a bug in Audacity, so I’ve logged it on the Audacity issue tracker.

I can see in the code that it should avoid adding spaces when there is a hyphen, but it looks like that code is not working as intended.