Craig Smith said in 991215 MMDigest:

> What you need is an old fashioned 'Daisy Wheel' printer. ...  Just
> set up the margins and tabs correctly and then pop in the roll.  The
> thing will advance the roll forever and print a series of words in
> a column down the right side.

When Rex Lawson was gearing up to put words on rolls, I tried exactly
this using a Brother HR15 daisy-wheel.  Brother don't support them any
more (and didn't do it very well when they did) but I was given two old
ones and bought a lot of different wheels when they were current.
There's a big font called Super Grande which is large and small caps
and ideal for song words.

Apart from the formatting -- a margin of 60 spaces, page width 110
spaces, infinite page depth -- it was easy, but I really needed a way
of reading the roll so the computer could vamp-till-ready on carriage
returns and so reset any drift, and never got round to that part of it.
Probably a light cell positioned at middle B flat would do it !

One of the snags in commercial production would be that Brother daisy
wheels didn't all last very well.  Some of the fonts broke up fairly
quickly, whereas some others, such as Courier, seem to have an infinite
life.  Anelia which is very like the rubber-stamp font Aeolian's London
subsidiary Universal Music used for classical markings such as
"Allegro", is very short-lived, alas.

In the end Rex used a different printer, very successfully as anyone
will know who has the 1995 AMICA Convention roll, and I'll try and
get something out of him about it.  He has now progressed to being on
someone else's email system.

Dan Wilson, London