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Comment by 60654 | Hacker News Reader

I did...?

The article goes into almost tedious detail about where it came from, and whether it constitutes a "proper" font. I think you may have skimmed too fast.

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://archive.org/details/standardletterin00claf/page/42/m...

[1] 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.

The issue is that the author presents the entire set of typefaces that are similar to Gorton as derived from Gorton without presenting evidence to rule out the obvious alternative lineage: that, just like genuine Gorton, they too were derived from the various regional single-stroke letterforms that draftsman everywhere were taught and used. Excellent draftsman’s examples abounded and would have been so much more common than genuine Gorton and its genuine ancestors that it’s hard to believe that regional companies marketing their own type engraving machines would have had to copy Gorton rather than local examples of the draftsman’s art that were considered superior.

The article has a link to the licensing agreement between Taylor Hobson and Gorton, links to other posts explaining how Leroy bought Gorton machines, an interactive comparison where you can see the similarity of the letters, and dozens of photos and scans of docs where you can compare them yourself, too. I would say that is a lot of evidence presented.

But that evidence is not persuasive that the set of fonts that the author calls Gorton are actually derived from the lineage he presents (see the diagram captioned “The Gorton quasisuperfamily”), rather than from freehand lettering that would have been much more widely used at the time. Remember that the letterforms themselves could not qualify for legal protection in the United States. So none of the licensing agreements offered as evidence were needed to acquire the fonts. So we can conclude that they were executed to acquire the machines and the patents behind them for the purpose of introducing similar machines in a new market. The machine designs and methods of production were the hard part. The fonts were comparatively trivial to create and incorporate into a machine, whatever its design.

The author's comparison of the fonts actually argues against them being of the claimed lineage. Consider the many differences between the Taylor, Taylor & Hobson machine’s fonts and the Gorton machine’s fonts. If Gorton had a license to use the Hobson machine designs, which they did, they could have simply copied the TT&H fonts verbatim. But they clearly did not. Why not? I think it's likely that they simply preferred a different design, one closer to the letterforms that were more commonly used by draftsmen in the American market. In other words, the Gorton reference design was not the TT&H font design.

At least, that's my best guess based on the evidence presented.

This quote is where the author seems to reach the conclusion they want, that is Gorton being the Proto-Indo-European of these drafting letterforms:

> Each of these reappearances made small changes to the shapes of some letters. Leroy’s ampersand was a departure from Gorton’s. Others softened the middle of the digit 3, and Wrico got rid of its distinctive shape altogether. Sometimes the tail of the Q got straightened, the other times K cleaned up. Punctuation – commas, quotes, question marks – was almost always redone. But even without hunting down the proof confirming the purchase of a Gorton’s pantograph or a Leroy template set as a starting point, the lineage of its lines was obvious. (The remixes riffed off of Gorton Condensed or the normal, squareish edition… and at times both. The extended version – not that popular to begin with – was often skipped.)

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.

I just read the article in full, and don't understand your point, either.

Maybe you could explain what part of the comment you replied to you think is either wrong or already covered by the article, so that either we can realise what we failed to notice in our first reading or so someone can explain to you why you're wrong in thinking that comment isn't correct in the context of having read the full article :)

I'm sure it started as an oral tradition based on legibility. The communicating new ideas about physical objects on paper is difficult and I was taught that is was a lesson on clarity. Codifying best practices is what cultures do as they evolve.

While I can appreciate the parent commenter's criticism, I think the author tried to head it off with this concession of their chosen naming convention:

> In the end, I’m sticking with Gorton for the whole branch since that feels the most well-known name, but I feel ill-equipped to make that call for everyone. You might choose to call it Gorton, Leroy, TT&H, Taylor-Hobson, or one of the many other names. (Just, ideally, not Linetica.)

Since the author was concentrated on the particular letterforms that seemed more consistent in the lineage observed, the usage makes sense. But that naming, even with the acknowledgement that it likely comes from the standards of drafting of the day:

> This was perhaps the first modern pantograph engraver, and perhaps even the arrival of a concept of an engraving font – the first time technical writing was able to be replicated consistently via the aid of the machine.

But it also seems a reasonable critique of the article that it's mislabeling to call the MIL-SPEC-33558 and ANSI Y14.2M or even the WWII equipment lettering "Gorton" simply by visual similarity without evidence to show ancestry to the specific engraving machines, dies, or letter sets of Gorton/TTH/etc. And that is also done throughout both with direct evidence and without.

Read it again then, because all of these are discussed in the article.

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