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The "science" of correct spacing has always been an elusive subject. In fact it has never been reduced to a science but remains an art. Many attempts, and some of them clever, have been made to provide a rule or set of rules whereby letters can be automatically spaced in forming words and appear to be equidistant from each other.

The ideal to be reached, of course, is that the individual letters shall appear uniformly spaced. Of the many attempts to do this "mechanically' none of them so far have succeeded. It has proved as perplexing and futile a task as the solution of the problem of perpetual motion, and will probably never be solved for the same reason. The reason, too, is obvious.

If we were dealing in similarly shaped characters the problem would be easy. But practically every letter having an entirely different shape and on account of the infinite number of combinations in which we are called upon to place the letters, there can be but one rule for spacing and that is a simple one-The eye is the rule.

As the eye must be the final judge, and as the letters in a word must all appear to be equally spaced apart, though they can not be so mechanically, the surest and shortest cut to correct spacing is to satisfy the eye at the start in the "blocking out of the letters. Refer to figures 4 and 5, page 6, for a graphic illustration of the fundamental principle involved in spacing.