This question is purely theoretical. Why do you call function ‘casting off’ as you do? Ive asked brithish friends (not musicians and more over not music notation app users) and they couldn’t answer my question. I totally get what it does, just am curious how the expression came…
It’s a term used in old typesetting and music engraving. Ted Ross discusses it in his book on engraving:
“Casting off is … the determining of the number of measures per staff, staves per page, and pages per composition.”
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So it is not surprising that my english friends couldn’t give me a clue!
In publishing, casting off is determining how many sheets or signatures will be required in the production of a printed document or book. It is used on both sides of the pond. The Oxford Reference defines it thus:
“To ‘cast-off’ printer’s copy is to estimate in advance how many sheets will be required to print a given manuscript, and to estimate the amount of copy needed to fill a single sheet. The practice meant that work could be shared out among a number of men working simultaneously. It was adopted for the Shakespeare First Folio. Mistakes could result in the spreading out of a small amount of material over a large space, or in the crowding, even omission, of lines. In Titus Andronicus, for instance, at the foot of a page, a single line of verse is printed as two lines (III. i. 95), whereas on the crowded last page of Much Ado About Nothing, verse is printed as prose, words are omitted, and abbreviated forms are used to save space.”
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Just to clarify, it does not only relate to music.
related to casting type in a type foundry, which are still around, for example:
Software (DTP, Music etc.) handles this, with the settings, spacing, fonts etc. we have determined, or tweaked at the end, before we print.
Also the term is used in knitting.
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So tempting to post a comment here about some composition students whose notation is a sign of the greater genius. 
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In a post about 3 years ago, I wrote:
“When I was at university, there was a group of up-and-coming young composition students who practised the fad of writing all their notes with the stems on the wrong side. They could read it quite easily, but most others had trouble as it took quite some getting used to.”
After having viewed the sometimes semi-indecipherable handwriting of some of these “geniuses”, I often wondered if any of their more listenable works had ever been presented to a music publisher for publication but were turned down because the engraver/editor found it too difficult to read the “pigeon scrawl” that was presented to them.
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By the way, is any preference list of great editor houses (like Peter’s or Ricordi) available or it is top secret?
Back in my younger days 1950s I roamed the seven seas and each time leaving port , letting go the mooring ropes was called “casting off” then go back another 20 years to the 1930s when I was a young “whipper spapper”, My Grandmother would do a whole lot of knitting, making clothes for me and other kids.
As each item being knitted was being completed the final part of the work was known as “casting off” I guess a measure employed to prevent the whole thing coming apart.
Are my observations of any use, as I experiences with notation programs require one to save the current piece of work, Casting off ?
Bob 1935
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