Music engraving

The central problem posed to early music engravers using moveable type was the proper integration of notes, staves, and text.

Ottaviano Petrucci, one of the most innovative music printers working at the turn of the sixteenth century, used a triple impression technique that printed staves, text, and notes in three separate steps.

[1] Although plate engraving had been used since the early fifteenth century for creating visual art and maps, it was not applied to music until 1581.

Copper was the initial metal of choice for early plates, but by the eighteenth century pewter became the standard material due to its malleability and lower cost.

Also at this time, a music copyist was often employed to hand-copy individual parts (for each performer) from a composer's full score.

There are various such programs, known as scorewriters, designed for writing, editing, printing and playing back music, though only a few produce results of a quality comparable to high-quality traditional engraving.

Beginning in the 1980s, WYSIWYG software such as Sibelius, Mozart, MusicEase, MuseScore, Finale, and Dorico first let musicians enter complex music notation on a computer screen, displaying it just as it will look when eventually printed.

The software translates the usually handwritten description into fully engraved graphical pages to view or send for printing, taking care of appearance decisions from high level layout down to glyph drawing.