A METAR is one line of upper-case text that holds an entire sky: airport, Zulu hour, wind, visibility, cloud bases, temperature over dewpoint, altimeter. Nothing is decorative. The capitals are not a design decision — the Teletype type box carried no lower case.

This system rebuilds the artefact rather than the idea of it: canary roll stock, black Underwood ribbon, sprocket margins down both edges, a fixed 72-character column that never centres itself. Decode annotations hang beneath the string on thin leader rules. Everything else gets out of the way of the code.