Very interesting debate which hopefully remains civil as we all learn from this thread. While I don't wish to make any comments as to the authenticity of the sword which appears to be a fine period piece by most accounts, my observations relate to the inscriptions in general.
I am by profession a graphic designer and started my field as a typographer and scribe (lettering artist), having studied under a German master scribe who actually served part of his apprenticeship at one of the blade producers during the War, I forget now which. He related to us some of the methods used on dedication blades and we as apprentices had to apply some of these old techniques ourselves to various contoured metal objects. There were typically several scribes employed by factories, each of which applied their own favoured techniques and styles. The dedication blades were highly contested by the scribes as not only was there a level of prestige, but it detracted from the daily mill of artwork and lettering, as such, great care was generally taken in lettering a named dedication. Back then this work was done with a flat pen and masking ink. The technique I was taught differs slightly to that explained by FredJS in that the scribe would carefully plot the dedication on paper to achieve the correct position, centering and also the required line breaks and border dimensions. From there a acid resistant "ink" was written directly onto the blade using a broad pen by the scribe in Gothic calligraphy. Corrections and deletions to his workmanship were common until the scribe was completely satisfied with his typography, layout and penmanship. As FredJS pointed out, the etching process was done by a different tradesman.
FredJS's point about capitalisation of Gothic style letting is valid in my experience. Gothic capitals are basically illegible to most, however not to people back then, capitalisation was usually done in the style of the hand-written script, and the combination of Roman style lettering would not have been characteristic, certainly not back then, HOWEVER, each scribe had his own style, letter forms and unique characteristics in how they formed and completed words, some better than others. Lettering for flags, medals, etc would NOT fall into this category, I refer specifically to the penmanship of the scribe lettering in Gothic hand. There are several key factors that I personally look for in any hand-written inscription.
No two letters should ever be identical, while the scribe tried to achieve uniformity, it is very difficult, so there are usually small differences in the spaces, shapes and angle of pen-strokes. This can even be noted on "mass-produced" inscriptions like SA & SS mottoes which were also hand-penned for the master templates.
One will often note forced compression of ascenders and decenders on these inscriptions in an effort to try and fit them into the blade fuller. You will often see compressed "g, h, p and the flourishes on capital letters.
Many fakes produced post-war use mechanical fonts which were created using rub-down letters produced by Letraset, often in a font called Fraktur which was based on Germanic script. Also fakers would use "Old English" style text which has a different style to the Germanic form. You'll often see these on those early UK etched K98 bayonets.
Many post-war inscriptions were not done by scribes, but by finished artists who frequently made errors in letter form, character angles and the shapes of flourishes, many "rules" of penmanship were broken by these artists, thus easily detectable.
Just my two cents from my own personal experience...
