Computer assisted music printing

Although typography and type-setting of textual material has undergone a major revolution in the past decade through the introduction of computer techniques and devices, no such progress has occurred in what would appear to be the closely allied field of music printing, especially in the commercial area of high quality presentation. From the purely graphical point of view, there appears to be little problem. A piece of music consists of a rather small collection of stylised black symbols printed on white paper, something quite within the capability of a large number of graphics output devices. The difficulty is not in this area at all, but in the problem of placing the symbols in the ‘right’ places.