Besides the forementioned evidences of forgery by tracing, where pencil or carbon guide-lines are used which must necessarily be removed by rubber, there are liable to remain some slight fragments of the tracing lines, while the mill finish of the paper will be impaired and its fiber more or less torn out, so as to lie loose upon the surface.  Also the ink will be more or less ground off from the paper, thus giving the lines a gray and lifeless appearance.  And as retouchings are usually made after the guide-lines have been removed, the ink, wherever they occur, will have a more black and fresh appearance than elsewhere.  All these phenomena are plainly manifest under the microscope.  Where the tracing is made directly with pen and ink over a transparency, as is often done, no rubbing is necessary, and of course, the phenomena from rubbering does not appear.

Where signatures or other writings have been forged by previously making a study and practice of the writing, to be copied until it has been to a greater or less degree idealized, the hand must be trained to its imitation so that it can be written with a more or less approximation as to form and natural freedom.

Forgeries and tracings made by skilful imitators are the most difficult of detection, as the internal evidence of forgery by tracing is mostly absent.  The evidence of free-hand forgery and tracing is chiefly in the greater liability of the forger to inject into the writing his own unconscious habit and to fail to reproduce with sufficient accuracy that of the original writing, so that when subjected to rigid analysis and microscopic inspection, the spuriousness is made manifest and demonstrable.  Specific attention should be given to any hesitancy in form or movement in tracing which is manifest in angularity or change of direction of lines, changed relations and proportions of letters, slant of the writing, its mechanical arrangement, disconnected lines, retouched shades, etc.

Photographs, greatly enlarged, of both the signatures in question and the exemplars placed side by side for comparison will greatly aid in making plain any evidence of forgery.

If practicable, use for comparison as standards both the imitated writing and that of the imitator’s traced writing.  These methods, employed by skilled and experienced examiners, will rarely fail of establishing the true relationship between any two disputed handwritings and more especially where the question of a forged or traced signature is under discussion.

Under the microscope tracing by the pen-nibs are usually easily visible, and they differ with every variety of pen employed.  A stiff, fine-pointed pen makes two comparatively deep lines a short distance apart, which appear blacker in the writing than the space between them, because they fill with ink, which afterwards dries and produces a thicker layer of black sediment than those elsewhere.  The variations of pressure upon the pen can be easily noticed by the alternate widening and narrowing of the band between these two furrows.  The tracing appears knotty and uneven when made by an untrained hand, while it appears uniformly thin, and generally tremulous or in zigzags when made by a weak but trained hand.