Rencently, we had a thread about books about music engraving standards. After this, I decided to buy Chlapik's book, which begins with a very interesting chapter about traditional hand-engraving of music:
The engraver would scratch the soft metal plate whith a five-pronged stylus to provide the staves, and ... ping, ping, ping ! ... he would hammer the musical symbols into the plate. He would write from right to left. (There is a shorter, similar article on: http://www.henle.de/englisch/info/notenstich.htm ) Afterwards, the plate would be moistered with green ink, which would result into a "green copy", with white symbols on a green background, with the proper orientation. This copy was intended for proof reading. (green is claimed to be the most ergonomical colour for this purpose) Nowadays, the following set of copies is made with photographic techniques. But in the past, the same plate was used to print the *entire* set of copies. Does anybody know how you could provide copies with black symbols on a white background ? What caused the ink to remain in the engraved cavities ? If this plate was used as a mould, to provide another plate with symbols *higher* than the background, this plate would have had the correct orientation, but the copies wouldn't ? I welcome technical details. Regards, Jean-Pierre Coulon E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Observatoire de la C�te d'Azur D�partement FRESNEL, groupe ILGA BP 4229 06304 NICE Cedex 4 Tel (33) {0}4 92 00 31 58 Fax (33) {0}4 92 00 31 38 _______________________________________________ TeX-music mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://sunsite.dk/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
