Ideas and what do you like.
Ok as I am learning this whole civil3d drafting thing and pulling my hair out. I have started looking at different font styles. What do you like on your plats and as built drawings and why. I am starting to develop my own little mark or brand as I get more time in. I spent all day today reviewing plans for errors and consistency as they were being done by different people to be combined. I noticed a lot of different choices sometimes even on same drawing. So as I did the checks and made comments my ls said how do you notice those things. I said i have no idea but it??s different. Anyway I want to kinda pick y??alls brains that have been doing this for a long time. What is going to be the most legible years from now. What is easy on the eyes once it hits paper. I know hand drafting I have seen many that were far more cleaner looking than what was printed. I like fonts that make it easier to see the 8 vs 0 as they fade and words that are clean. I just don??t know what exactly has proven name wise to be the best. Simplex my boss likes. Leroy I tested the other day in TBC. Any advice for a rookie drafter. Are much appreciated.
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I??m convinced anymore that no matter what I do the first print won??t be right. It always looks different after I print/plot it.
@on_point yes. We are all in different locations so i am reviewing pdfs. Just checking the little things mostly before being sent out. But we do have a plotter/printer coming soon where I can test a little more on fonts . Today was a hard push to finalize some stamped as builts. I was qa/qc raw data and getting the points to the correct drafter for different sheets. But we all made it through. Now i see all the different way things are labeled and such and i am a caver and alignment guy i like things consistent. Seeing anything different jumps off the page at me. Probably my imagery training kicks in. I see some lettering i like but nothing that just grabs me and sais this is it. A couple years ago I was handed a plat for around 50 acres. Cut out of 200. When i saw that plat the lightbulb went off. I ran i. And asked my ls if he could introduce me to this guy so I could see if i could pay him to show me all what he did. The plat was from the 80??s and it was just clean nice. Nothing fancy just what i liked. I said when i stamp my first one i want this font these line thickness and such. Unfortunately the guy passed and we inherited his ongoing work. But hopefully i will get a comment or two here that when i test it will be it. Lol. And you are correct you will find any errors as soon as it comes from plotter.
I’m not blessed with a strong sense of artistry — so take my comments with a grain of salt — but I use simple sans serif fonts for all map annotations.
Romans, Romand are my mainstays. I also use Bold in my title block, some custom shadow fonts built around Romans-like geometry, and my logo has some serifed outlined text. But the map itself is almost all Romans and Romand.
Avoid using too many fonts on a map. I’ve seen some horrendous creations that use an apparently random assortment of TrueType fonts, and the effect is super distracting, making the map unpleasant to read.
ARIAL!!!!!
😉
@jim-frame I am no artist either. I can barely draw stick men. ????. I am a times new roman in word and excel all day. My wife gets frustrated and sais i am an ild man. Its just looks clean and easy to read for me. Yes i saw that today reviewing sheets as many different fonts on same types of labels. Drove me nuts. Thank you i will surely try it out.
@jitterboogie Is that your girl friends name. Lol or what. Just kidding. I will try that as well.
well,Arial Bold.
You owe me a beer, I saved your life by the hands of my better 2/3s.
We’re going to have a fun sit down someday. in the words of Justin Wilson ” I gaurontee!”
Tahoma. Clean, clear, crisp. You can see it on the Test Yourself problems in the American Surveyor magazine.
Simplex my boss likes. Leroy I tested the other day in TBC. Any advice for a rookie drafter.
Select a “Truetype” font, and not a “Simplex” one. The line weight of “Simplex” type fonts is dependent the current lineweight setting. Truetypes, such as Arial, Tahoma, Swiss, or Calibri will plot the same no matter what pen/line weight or color is used. If you want Truetypes bolded you select bolding. But the proportions remain true.
Keep it simple, clean and crisp. Arial or Arial Narrow, and vary it with bold, italicized, or bold and italicized. This font seems to be the best at maintainning legibility from poor copying and printing as well as scanning for recording.
I have seen firms try and use fonts that mimic hand lettering or something fancy and they, well, just suck. Not to mention the font type bloats the drawing file size.
@norman-oklahoma That was an interesting read. Thanks.
@gary_g Thats a mouth full. I never knew there were so much to know about fonts. I like your reasoning. Explanation. I am a keep it simple stupid kinda of person. For sure.
I don’t have the patience for drafting. I really do appreciate when a company has taken the time to create a company C3D template.
I’m not blessed with a strong sense of artistry
So true for me. I’m probably the only non-artistic, non-creative lefty. My left and right brains must be switched about
@jflamm well I am more of a computational and qc/qa person and I like solving problems or trying to figure out why something is not correct. But i need the drafting as well. I know what i want to do between Terramodell commands and Autocad 14 commands floating around in my head I get all choked up trying to figure out how to get civil3d to do something lol. Unfortunately I have not had the time I would like yet just drafting yet. We are so busy I have been computing grades and such. I like TBC and excel and my hp for that.
I will say it does take patience for sure. I need to go back working horses as that is the greatest patience teacher ever. My brother has the a patience of Job. Literally. He does nothing but horses all the time. Starting colts and such. Problem horses or as he puts it problem people causing horses to have issues lol. He would make a heck of a drafter. He has always been very artistic. Lol.
One company I worked for had as a standard of using the Roman fonts, RomanS for b/d’s, Roman C, D & T for things like Lot callout, road names, and other large sized things.
I’m partial to Arial/Arial Black and Tahoma myself.
I might be in the minority, but am not a fan of the Romans and simplex styles…aside from the plotting issues, they look too dated to me. When all I’ve got to work with is a black & white drawing, I like it to look like it was made in this century.
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil Postman@rover83 nice. I will be taking all of this into thought for sure. I am sure as I get more stick time I will develop my own opinion as well along with whoever is stamping it until i pass my exam. Thank you
When you compare Swiss, Arial, Tahoma, and Calibri letter by letter there is not much of a difference. But when you compare a paragraph written in each of these fonts you can see it. It really is more about the proportional spacing than it is about symbol shape.
For this reason I recommend that you make a policy of using MTEXT for all your annotations instead of TEXT (fka DTEXT). Using MTEXT also allows you to use Bolding and Italics, columnization, and makes background masking of the text block possible.
I use Arial for most of the reason mentioned already. One consideration for me is the ability of my bearings and distances to hold up to multiple scans or copies. Thinner artsy-fartsy fonts will be illegible once scanned, printed, then copied. This might be a viewed as a good feature for the text in your professional seal, but I always want my bearing text legible.
Also, please do the world a favor a go with 0.1 annotative and not 0.08.
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