When computers first began writing music, there was an immediate problem with musicians who were accustomed to reading both from printed and handwritten parts. Printed parts were regarded as somehow official and trustworthy, whereas everyone knew that handwritten parts were prone to copyists' mistakes -- wrong notes, missing dynamics and articulations etc. Players felt reluctant to edit parts that looked as if they had been printed by a bona fide publisher, but were quite ready to make all sorts of changes to handwritten parts.

That was then. This is now. All parts are generated by computer. There is in my opinion no good reason to use faux hand fonts for music, as nobody is fooled by it, anymore than anyone is fooled by pretend handwritten letters from the Readers' Digest. Many of us harbour a fondness for the charm of some copyist's hand, just as we may remember the beauty of a favourite aunt's handwriting. But trying to recreate either with computer fonts is dishonest and futile.

What I say is: either use proper computer fonts for music, or switch off and take to pen and ink again.

John

On 25 Oct 2005, at 03:07, Mark D Lew wrote:

 The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that my eye understands that the built in purposeful imperfection of a computer produced "hand looking" character will be the same every time it is printed, and there's an intuitive dissonance to that.  Seeing the controlled inconsistency of beautiful hand copying is something else altogether, and we may not be able to get a machine to produce that illusion.


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