The Lost Art of Drafting and Fonts

[Anonymous]

I have a opprotunity to set up new standards at the company I'm at.  and honestly as a old school drafter that started off drafting by hand.  there are certain aspects I miss of the hand drafted drawings that we seem to have lost in todays computer generated plans.  there are a few, mostly in the architectural community that still use fonts that resemble hand drawn fonts.  but I haven't seen any fonts that I would consider look like either a civil designers hand or even a Leroy stincle.   so my question is what fonts would you use if you were to set up a standard and you were trying to make it look somewhat old school?  

I'm sure I'll still use Romans and Aerial, and I may even use an Itallics Romans for the Leroy look.  the closest thing I've found for a hand look that i like is the hand1.shx, but I'm not that happy with it. 

P.S.  if it isn't a standard package font that you recomend.  is it free and where can I get it?  

Thanks

Mark

[Pointdump]

Mark,

Give StylusBT a try. It's an OOTB(Out of the Box) font that kinda resembles hand-lettering.

Dave

[Jay_B]

Funny to see this post,  just had a coworker asking here today, how we used to draw in a survey by hand back in the day?

So I was explaining the base line, station / offset with scales & triangles way of doing things.

Even dug out the old Leroy templates, scriber, some plastic buttons, which held together prehistoric xref's mylar overlays, and all sorts of other fun stuff.

Agreed it's somewhat of a lost art but can't say I miss trying to keep any of those pens clean.

We use simplex.shx for most of our notes which matches Leroy pretty close.

[rl_jackson]

Yeah I just loved using those pens, the cleaning was somewhat of a pain can't think of a shirt back then that some how or another didn't end up with ink on it somewhere.

I've been using Arial fonts since 2000 even did a little script in LLD that would read drawing scale and set the height accordingly. 🙂

Now, I've started dabbling Tahoma, and even use Swiss BT Outline for Subdivision and Lot Labels, and of course use variants Bold, Italic etc...

I use no shx fonts, find them annoying since there take on the characteristics of the layer (ctb or stb) style, where as TTF you get what you get, and you know exactly how it looks every time. Not to mention the ability to search the pdf for keywords when plotted. (Legal descriptions can get long, and just by doing a quick search you and locate what others say is wrong with them.

[Anonymous]

Agreed only thing worse than that was pen plotters and plotting a notes sheet, just to pause the printer every 10min or so to pull the pens out and shake them up so they don't clog. I'm a leftie so I also had the problem of having to be extra careful to not drag my hand through the wet ink.

[Anonymous]

seems a little thin. However after poking the bear a while I think I found some that might work for the look I'm trying to achieve. and they are all TTF, so they should scale well if needed.

for a hand drafting look I like the StylusBT. It looks somewhat hand drawn but not overdone and provides an easy read.
and for the leroy I like Gulim and GulimCHE (narrow) both of these give a rounded look on the ends that other fonts seem to fail at when trying to get a Leroy look.

thanks for the input.

[neilyj666]

My Text styles are all set with this one.....

[rl_jackson]

Where does that come from, not a widows standard, but that is a mechanical drafting standard name, that probably matches the old leroy plates to a tee

[MikeEvansUK]

I also started on pen and ink we used to use stensils to detail text which was time consuming. Each text size was also based on pen size (1.8,2.5,3.5,5.0,7.0mm etc)

Our standards here are to use Arial but I would always use RomanS as this allows the pen thickness to be applied to the font. I still use Romans for backgrounds or others drawings set to a greyed out and light pen width.

[rl_jackson]

Something to consider, is the I and L in the font as with Arial and some others I and lower case l are the same character this is what prompted me to start a new search for something other that Arial. Like with the work "Illegible"

[Kundertk]

Haha, I remember setting up company standards at a company I worked at fifteen years ago. We used romans.shx with a width factor of 0.85 so that we could take the electric eraser to part of the plotted drawings and add some Leroy touch-up text instead of replotting the drawings for minor revisions. I found the width factor helped make it look pretty much exactly the same as the Leroy template text.

The thing that bugs me most about losing the "art of drafting" is seeing people putting text right on top of linework & relying on wipeouts to make it readable, rather than just moving the text over a little bit so you can see both.

[jwverde]

Old post, but still a concern with sterile Cad graphics... try Flux Architect font. It’s probably the closest font that resembles hand drawn lettering.

Much of of my early work was hand drawn, so I feel your pain....

[Anonymous]

This guy built a font based on the Leroy lettering sets.

https://caseyburns.com/artwork/font-design/

[hencoop]

As a fellow old school board-drafting-orign AutoCAD user I feel your pain.  I wrote a standard for a client that is old school based but also acknowledges the new technology as well:

Old School methods use a vector font that closely approximates Leroy characters.  That is RomanS.shx (Romans Simplex) for smaller plotted text sizes and it is RomanD.shx (Romans Duplex) for larger plotted text sizes.  Matching the appropriate Leroy pen thickness for a given plotted text size is accomplished using pen tables and widths that match the various Leroy pen widths.  The rounded end appearance of character pen strokes is formed as a result of using a vector font and the default pen table setting "Line end style" of either "Use object end style" or else explicitly "Round".

New methods use TrueType fonts which have a fixed appearance that is only affected by style settings such as Bold, Italic, etc.  Pen widths have no effect on them whatsoever.

IMHO even today's drafting involves or should involve some professional skill (artistry?) in the selection of "pen widths" (or line widths if that is your method).  They should always appropriately represent the object AND the specific communication intended by the adding the object to that specific drawing.  Everything included on a specific drawing should be there to communicate something that is required to make the content and purpose of the drawing clear to the reader.  Instruction in appropriate line width usage for various drawing elements is historically a core subject of training drafters and I am concerned that it may no longer be taught... at least not from what I am seeing being produced by today's "modern" drafters, this seems to be so.

[jacob.dwyer]

As a new-ish technologist (graduated 2015), I can confirm that (at least in Nova Scotia) the importance of line widths and font choices are at least given lip service to students and trainees. We had a semester where we were taught some of the basics of hand-drafting. As the only former art student in my class, however, I seemed to be the only one that appreciated and understood the purpose and value of the class. I believe that is the reason I obtained the job I have over some more experienced candidates.

I agree with what everyone has been saying here, every line is important, and should communicate something relevant to the viewer of the plans. This is something I consider in every plan I make (and something that, despite my best efforts, I often find myself judging in plans from others).

[jwverde]

Thanks....and I would add that multiple check plots are necessary to achieve the desired line quality. I think that we rely on the computer monitor too often and get lazy. Strive for perfection!

[neilyj666]

...and my pet hate is when I receive a pdf of a CAD drawing and the text colour is yellow which works really well on a white paper background....

I have my paperspace background set to white so I can avoid this sort of schoolboy error...!!!!

[Anonymous]

I also like isocp3.shx font with a 20d oblique angle for existing text. 

I like shx fonts because you can dim or darken them easily with .ctb plotting.

[jefflambert9091]

This post took me back to the days where I learned to draft by hand and started with AutoCAD 7, monochrome monitor and the Draftmaster II days maintaining pens in the plotter. As much as it pains me to say, the new generation doesn’t care about handwritten fonts. That goes from plan production through plan use. Actually, probably better since its not hard to misread an Arial font. I find it much easier to stay with the out of the box fonts and fonts that are PDF friendly. There are ways to make your own/company style stand out, but I think practicality needs to still be involved. Using non out of the box fonts creates problems for us and clients. Clients want a plan that is user friendly more than a hand drafting look.  Thanks for a blast from the past!

[hencoop]

For me, the error would be that the line is not either black or else some shade of gray.  Drafting with any use of color is definitely NOT old school (unless you are creating maps or other typically colorful drawings... then all bets are off).  I create engineering design drawings and on old-school drawings of that type colors could not be reproduced on a Blueprint machine (or later, a Blueline machine).  "Blackline" is the term of today for these drawings.

All of the various width black pens that I use (colors 1-7,10,11) are set to plot black.  I don't use 8 or 9 because they tend (or tended) to not play nice and would reset themselves to values that would screw up my plots.  For grays I use colors between 250-255.  For a full range of gray I set the tone of 250 and 255 to just shy of black and white.  I use a black background to draw on so I invert the intensity of the grays so that the brighter the white of the gray the darker the plotted shade of gray will be.  This is so that it appears on my black background visually corresponding to how it will appear on my plot.

My way isn't the "right way" but it is one of many valid ways to get the job done.

P.S.  Occasionally I need to use colors for one-of-a kind documents.  I use the colors between 12 and 249 which are all mapped to use object color.  I'll use plinewidth or linewidth to set the width of colored objects on these drawings as all of the colored pens are set to a 0.35mm pen width.  Polyline width acts just like TrueType fonts in that it restricts the plotted width to whatever the pline width is exactly.