Good question. Here's an article showing an image from the original "Real Book." This is hand written. http://www.thepianoshed.com/teaching-blog/the-truth-abou

Good question. Here's an article showing an image from the original "Real Book." This is hand written. http://www.thepianoshed.com/teaching-blog/the-truth-about-the-real-book http://www.thepianoshed.com/teaching-blog/the-truth-about-th... Amusingly, it's about the controversy over whether the chord changes are accurate or not. Now, this style has heavily influenced how jazz "lead sheets" are typeset as well. For instance Chuc Sher's "New Real Book" has a section in the foreword about how they studied the script of the old Real Book before starting their own project. Now a typeset sheet for another tune: https://www.musicforballetclass.com/product/take-the-a-train-piano-sheet-music-pdf/ https://www.musicforballetclass.com/product/take-the-a-train... Notice that the chord symbols are much smaller -- nobody can bring themselves to make the font big enough for some reason. The melody is broken up into awkward groups of 3, 4, and 5 measures. And so forth. It's like trying to write a poem with word wrap turned on. The typical workflow for a jazz chart was that the composer / arranger wrote a score with all of the parts, and sent it to a copyist, who wrote out the individual parts for use by the band. The copyist earned repeat business by the quality of their work.