Fellow listers;

I received the following query from a colleague & would appreciate any input
from the collective wisdom of the list:

***************************

As you know, the graver is the scoring tool used to create the staff lines
in traditional plate engraving. I started researching what the actual graver
sizes for traditional plate engraving are, which are defined only as sizes
0-8.

These numbers 0-8 supposedly correspond to the major staff sizes universally
accepted by "modern music engravers" (according to Ted Ross), but there is
no mention of what their measurements actually are.

Originally, I got the graver sizes by measuring the scorer-created staff
lines printed in Ted Ross's book on page 57, but the photocopy is so bad, I
had doubts as to whether these measurements are accurate. So, I asked
around, and did some searching on Google, and actually got some answers!

It turns out that Sibelius had researched this extensively for their early
Acorn version of the application, and had defined these sizes as:

Number 0 = 9.2mm
Number 1 = 7.9mm
Number 2 = 7.3mm
Number 3 = 7.0mm
Number 4 = 6.7mm
Number 5 = 6.1mm
Number 6 = 5.6mm
Number 7 = 4.8mm
Number 8 = 3.7mm

There is a little bit of discrepancy, though. Here is a site which talks
about these settings in Music Press:
http://www.bandcmusic.com/Stage/text-basics-01003.html 

Take a look at the table of these sizes listed in *centipicas*. I'm assuming
that is .01 of a printer's pica, which was 0.166 inch or 4.22 mm. (For
convenience, PostScript rounded the definitions of point and pica to exactly
1/72 and 1/6 inch, respectively, but the original units were ever so
slightly smaller.) 

Just to be academic, would this mean that the actual values rounded to the
nearest 0.1mm are?: 

9.1 
7.8 
7.1 
6.7 
6.4 
6.1 
5.4 
4.7 
3.7 

If these 'centipicas' are actually 1/600 inch, the only difference it would
make is that the #3 staff would round to 6.8 mm instead of 6.7

Dan Rupert

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