Comment by 60654
9 months ago
That's an assumption, I read it just fine. :) I just disagree with how the author keeps talking about draftsman's lettering as if it were some company's font (e.g. Gorton and Leroy) rather than a commonly taught community standard.
They do later talk about the real origin in 1894 in England, with TT&H creating it due to the constraints of their self-built lettering machine to engrave tiny letters on their products
As I mention in a previous comment [1], this style of hand lettering was common in textbooks prior to 1894. From 1883, for example, we find this specimen in Standard Lettering, published by the Columbia School of Drafting:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43055792
And again, the article explicitly mentions that, with a picture of a similar book:
> I don’t know how this first proto-Gorton was designed – unfortunately, Taylor, Taylor & Hobson’s history seems sparse and despite personal travels to U.K. archives, I haven’t found anything interesting – but I know simple technical writing standards existed already, and likely influenced the appearance of the newfangled routing font.
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As a child, I have learned lettering based on the German DIN standards (DIN 16, DIN 17, DIN 1451).
While these standards date from around 1930, they were based on much older lettering textbooks. The oldest that I have seen was from 1871, and these German textbooks did not differ much from the American textbooks quoted above.