Movable characters

As I understand it, Indian editions of Sanskrit works in the late 18th and early 19th c. were typeset using movable lead types. I was wondering how the glyphs involving vowel mātras above and below lines were designed.

In fact, 14 (vowel signs) multiplied by 33 (consonants) builds a number of glyphs too high to imagine such a set of punches, especially because a typographer would not be able to handle it conveniently.

It is thus realistic to imagine a set of vowel-sign punches to be combined with the 33 consonant punches as the occasion arises. As further evidence, I noticed an instance in the editio princeps of the Nyāyamañjarī of an e-sign above the line (के), repeated again and again in combination with different consonants, that is peculiarly missing a portion, revealing an imperfection in the original punch, in the matrix or in the cast lead type.

Shanti Graheli, University of Udine, Italy, kindly suggests that the system used for Greek spirits may have been used, as in this images taken from P. Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (19952), and I believe she might be right.