.

The design for a new style of type is made generally with pen and
ink, the capital letters being drawn about an inch high and the others
in predetermined proportions. When the design is for a plain text
letter, similar to that with which this book is printed, it is
essential to have the letters proportioned and shaped in such a manner
as will cause the least strain on the eye in reading, and, at the same
time, produce a pleasing effect when the page is viewed as a whole.
When the printed page conveys information to the reader, without
attracting attention to itself, it is ideal.

While this is true in regard to a design for a text letter, the design
for a display type is often made to attract attention, not only to
itself, but to what it proclaims, by its boldness and beauty and
sometimes even by its ugliness.

After the design has been drawn, it is placed in a "delineating
machine," where an enlarged outline pencil copy, or tracing, is made,
so large that all errors are easily seen and corrected. New designs
may, however, be drawn in outline by hand on the enlarged scale, thus
rendering unnecessary both the pen-and-ink drawing and the tracing.

With the aid of the delineating machine, the operator, besides being
able to produce an accurately enlarged outline pencil tracing of a
design, is also enabled, by various adjustments, to change the form of
the pencil tracing in such a manner that it becomes proportionately
more condensed or extended, and even italicized or back-sloped. That
is, from a single design, say Gothic, pencil tracings can be made
condensed, extended, italicized, and back-sloped, as well as an
enlarged facsimile.

The next operation consists in placing the enlarged outline pencil
drawing in a machine which enables the operator to reproduce the
outline drawing, reduced in size, on a metal plate, evenly covered
with wax, with the line traced entirely through the wax. The plate is
then covered with a thin layer of copper, electrically deposited, and
is "backed up" with metal, and trimmed and finished, similar to an
ordinary electrotype plate of a page of type. A copper-faced metal
plate is thus produced, on which are the raised outlines of a letter.
This is called the "pattern." From this pattern all regular type sizes
may be cut. It determines the shape of the letter, but the size and
variations from the pattern are determined later by the adjustments of
the engraving machine in which it is used.