We present a novel normal form for (total deterministic) macro tree transducers (mtts), called depth proper normal form. If an mtt is in this normal form, then it is guaranteed that each parameter of each state of the mtt appears at arbitrary depth in the output trees of that state. Intuitively, if some parameter only appears at certain bounded depths in the output trees of a state, then this parameter can be removed by in-lining the corresponding output paths at each call site of that state. We use regular look-ahead in order to determine which of the paths should be in-lined. As a consequence of changing the lookahead, a parameter that was previously appearing at unbounded depths, may be appearing at bounded depths for some new look-ahead; for this reason, our construction has be iterated in order to obtain an mtt in depth-normal form. Using the normal form, we can decide whether the translation of an mtt has linear height increase or has linear size-to-height increase.
