6. History of Development

Bach was originally designed specifically for use in a spreadsheet (Informix Wingz) to create a database for manuscript study. This specific environment demanded that the font should contain both the normal English character set and a comprehensive set of musical symbols. This is why most of the music symbols in Bach are allocated to the locations above 7-bit ASCII range which cannot be typed easily. Accidentals are allocated to the keyboard accessible range, as they are always accompanied by alphabetical characters.

Bach was distributed as Shareware between 1992 and 2004, but now changed to freeware, as I am unable to respond to the questions of individuals due to lack of time. If there are any mistakes in this documentations or any way that this font can be improved, I would be very glad to hear.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the faithful users who paid the fees of using the fonts during that period.

I would also like to thank the following people who assisted me on various issues in the past:

• Ole Nielsby for his sharp observation on font definitions
• Neil Beshoori for advice on font hinting
• Andrew J. Mackriell for proof-reading the manual of Bach release 3.0
• Andreas Prilop for his information on how to convert Microsoft Word document between PC-Windows and Macintosh
• Jeroen Hellingman for converting fonts for Macintosh platform
• Peter Nix for Macintosh support when this font was being developed in Leeds, UK, in 1992-5
• Joshua Rifkin for various suggestions to develop Bach-slur
• John S Powell and Peter Hauge for suggestions to develop Bach-antico.