>
> Am I right in thinking that in the days when hand set metal type on
printing
> presses was the only method of printing that there were fonts of musical
> type? I have never seen any font of such type myself, though I have seen
> fonts for such non-text matters as chess sets and crossword puzzles.
>
As far as I know, music printing with mobile letters of this kind was
indeed done, mostly back in the 16th/17th century. There were "letters"
which each represented one fragment of a stave with one or several
noteheads on them. It tended to look pretty rough, though. Almost as if we
were to put staves together from ASCII characters like:
---o---
---|----
---|----
---|----
--------
High-quality printing since the mid-18th century has been done by engraving
or etching in metal plates, where the graphics are either first drawn by
hand on the metal surface, or applied to it with stamps of some sort.
Lukas
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