How this paper is ruled

Every distance on these pages came from somewhere. This page says where, so you can check it rather than take our word for it, and so you can see which choices are ours rather than anyone’s standard.

The staff

A standard staff is 7mm from its top line to its bottom line. That is rastral No. 3, the size traditionally used for single-stave parts and the ordinary size of commercial music paper. You get it unless you ask for more staves than will fit, in which case they shrink and the page tells you the new measurement before you buy.

For a second opinion: MOLA, the orchestra librarians’ association, asks for staves of 7.0–7.5mm in professional orchestral parts. Our standard sits at the bottom of that range.

By default the staff size is derived. You pick how many staves you want and the paper is ruled to hold them. You can also name the size outright, and then the size is fixed and the number of staves has to fit. Ask for more than will, and the page says so rather than quietly giving you smaller ones.

Rastral sizes

Traditional music paper is specified by rastral number. A rastral is the five-nibbed pen that ruled staff lines by hand, and its number is the height of the staff it draws, bottom line to top line, not the gap between lines.

• No. 0 9.2mm and No. 1 7.9mm, for educational music.
• No. 2 7.4mm, for piano music and songs.
• No. 3 7.0mm, No. 4 6.5mm and No. 5 6.0mm, for single-stave parts.
• No. 6 5.5mm and No. 7 4.8mm, for choral music and cue staves.
• No. 8 3.7mm, for full scores.

These are from Elaine Gould’s Behind Bars, Table 2, and they match the nine preset sizes Dorico ships. Paper you ask for by number measures what the number says. That is checked automatically every time this site is built.

Page size

Letter and A4 are free. Any other size is a dollar, including sizes meant for a tablet screen rather than a printer.

The tablet sizes offered are the drawing surface, worked out from each screen’s resolution divided by its pixel density. That comes to roughly 116 × 177mm for an 8-inch screen, 160 × 230mm for an 11-inch and 197 × 263mm for a 13-inch. Manufacturers publish the size of the device, which is a centimetre or two larger and the wrong thing to rule paper to.

They are labelled by screen size rather than by model, because a 13-inch tablet means the same thing for years while a model name needs revising every autumn. If yours is not listed, give the measurements directly. The custom field takes any size, at the same price.

One caveat. A note-taking app decides for itself how to scale a PDF. If it fits the page to the width of the screen, a 7mm staff is 7mm under your pencil. If it zooms, it is not. We can match the surface. We cannot make the app behave.

Spacing

Four distances, measured in staff heights, one staff height being the 7mm from a staff’s top line to its bottom line.

• 1.0 between two staves joined by a brace. The two hands of one pianist sit close together.
• 1.25 between staves inside a bracket. Separate players want more air than one player’s two hands.
• 1.625 across a group boundary, where one bracketed group ends and the next staff begins. This is what sets an organ’s pedal staff apart from its braced manuals.
• At least 1.5× the widest gap inside a system between one system and the next.

The first three are LilyPond’s published defaults, converted into these units. The fourth is ours. It exists because without it an organ’s pedal staff sat almost exactly halfway between its own manuals and the next system’s, and you could not tell which system it belonged to. On paper you are going to write on, that is a practical problem rather than a cosmetic one.

The number is ours, but the rule behind it is not. Gerou and Lusk’s Essential Dictionary of Music Notation puts it plainly: more space should be provided between systems than between the staves within them. The same book is why braced staves sit closest, since a pianist reads both at once and the eye should not have to jump.

One check we can offer on the bracket figure. At 1.25, a Letter page fits exactly three four-staff quartet systems at standard staff size, which is what commercially sold string-quartet manuscript paper uses. At the tighter braced spacing it would fit four, and look it.

Brackets, braces and barlines

A brace joins the staves of one instrument, a piano or an organ’s manuals. A bracket joins different players into a group. A brace is never nested inside a bracket.

Barlines follow the grouping rather than the system, because a barline is a claim that the staves it crosses are played together.

• A string quartet’s barline crosses all four staves.
• A piano trio’s does not. The violinist and the cellist each keep their own, and only the pianist’s two staves are joined.
• An organ’s crosses the manuals and stops before the pedal staff.

We checked the quartet case by measuring a published engraving of Beethoven’s Op. 18 No. 1. Reading it by eye first gave the wrong answer, so we measured the scan instead.

Clefs

The clefs, the brace and the bracket serifs are outlines from Bravura, the reference font for the SMuFL music notation standard, used under the SIL Open Font License.

They are drawn as shapes rather than as text, so no music font is embedded in your PDF. A page is around 3KB and prints identically everywhere, whatever fonts the machine has.

Each clef sits on the line it names. The treble clef curls around the G line, the bass clef’s dots straddle the F line, the alto clef centres on the middle line, and the tenor clef is the same C clef one line higher.

A one-line staff, used for unpitched percussion, takes the percussion clef and is given the vertical room of an ordinary staff with its line through the middle. How much room a bare line should have is not something our sources address, so that spacing is our judgement.

Instrument names

Names print in the margin to the left of the bracket, right-aligned. A braced instrument is labelled once rather than once per staff, so a piano is “Piano” and not “Piano” twice.

Names print on every system, which is a deliberate departure. A printed score gives full names on the first system and abbreviates after. Blank paper is a stack of interchangeable sheets. You print ten copies and use whichever is on top, so a sheet that differed from the others would be a sheet you had to keep track of.

The names come from a fixed list. There is no free-text field, here or anywhere else on the page, and that is on purpose. A title field opens font, then size, then alignment, then every other thing anyone ever wanted, and none of it makes the paper better to write on.

Tab

A tab staff has one line per string, and its lines sit half again as far apart as a notation staff’s. That is what LilyPond and MuseScore both default to for tablature. Any count from three to twelve strings works: bass, ukulele and mandolin at four, banjo at five, guitar at six, extended-range instruments above that.

On staff-and-tab paper the notation staff goes above, so the barlines line up over the fingering. The two are bracketed and joined by a single rule at the left, but each is ruled off separately at the right. That is how printed staff-and-tab paper does it, and we measured a sheet to be sure.

What we do not offer, and why

Titles, composer lines and dates. See above. Text on the page exists here only as instrument names.

Pre-barred paper, with measure divisions already ruled. Not built, and no strong reason against it. If we ever do build it, it will be free.

What we are not claiming

We are not claiming conformance to any engraving manual. Elaine Gould’s Behind Bars is the standard reference, and the rastral table above is taken from it directly, but the spacing figures are not and we have not built the rest of this to it. Those come from LilyPond’s published defaults, from the Bravura font itself, and in one case from our own judgement, which is marked as such above.

If something here is wrong, we would like to know: b@brianstoffer.com. Corrections are more useful to us than compliments.

Configure your paper →