Staff Rastral sizes in Digital Engraving apps

Discuss the rules of notation, standard notation practices, efficient notation practices and graphic design.
MJCube
Posts: 130
Joined: 15 Dec 2015, 13:32
Location: NYC

Re: Staff Rastral sizes in Digital Engraving apps

Post by MJCube »

Octo, respectfully, I think you are working too hard on something that has already been worked out in great detail by many printer manufacturers. My HP printer from 1998, for example, is nominally 600dpi but uses incremental dot filling to get smoother lines such as are needed for hairpins. I really cannot see the jaggies on paper even at that resolution. And of course most good laser printers today are much better than that.
tisimst wrote:It wouldn't be difficult to create a simple lookup table that grabs the proper pt size of the chosen rastral size.
I made myself a nice little chart on a web page. I always think of staff size in points (and page dimensions in picas) because I did typesetting before music setting.

Distances in Sibelius, for those who don’t know, are measured in 1/32 space increments; not as fine control as other programs, but I’m sure it was a huge help with the speed of screen drawing and other operations in the 1980s. This is why, for example, this tiny misalignment (topic from a couple weeks ago) is the best Sibelius can do.

Back to the original topic: I think it’s good for engravers today to know about rastral sizes, but it doesn’t seem necessary to use them. Just as traditional typesetters had their scales for reference, the concept of a logarithmic staff-size scale is a good one for music engraving.
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