Need help with the Main Slant guide distance

[baodingball]

Hello everyone.  I saw a post of E. W. Bloser's Madarasz letter and it fascinated me.  So I tried to find some reference materials.  I found ¨Lessons in Ornamental Penmanship by Parker Zaner Bloser.  On page 4, Study of Forms, sample characters can be found.  I am not exactly sure if this is the exact forms used by Bloser on his famous letter, but I think it is close.  Anyway, the sample form has main slant guides plotted to indicate the width of each letter, and I thought I really need this.  However, I do not know the distance between the slants.  It only says 50 degrees for the main slant and 25 degrees for the connective slant.  So I tried to plot this in Inkscape and I got this (see attachment).  Given a x-height, I copied the lines then rotate it 50 degrees (red lines).  This formed the rhombus grids.  I then plot some line along the longer diagonals (blue lines) and these line measured exactly 25 degrees.  My question is, did I get the distance of the main slant right?  I have problems controlling the width of my characters and I thought plotting Main Slant Guides will help me.  I will appreciate any feedback.  Thanks.

[Rednaxela]

Hi @baodingball, I think you're pretty close indeed.

I would be most happy to explain how I went about measuring the main slant distances in Plate 2 of The New Spencerian Compendium, but any other outcome than what you have now would result in a connective slant that's different from what Bloser specifies in his exemplar.

In any case, what I did was measure in an image editor the number of pixels taken up by as many x-heights I could select, and then divide that number by the number of selected x-heights. You could do the same with the grid cell widths, measuring them along the horizontal. With these two averages you could work out the ratio you're after.

Hope this helps!