I’m using a 1986 plat for a project, and it’s tough to differentiate between a 6 and an 8 without the aid of a magnifying glass. What is your preferred plat font?
See what I mean?
Scan quality of the original hardcopy seems to be equally contributing as the font size. I subscribe to never having text height smaller than .08"
I think the scanner is the culprit in a lot of these situations.
Whatever font you use make sure that it is a "Truetype" font. Simplex fonts such as used in your example plat adopt the pen weight (ie/lineweight) of the entity, whatever that might be. This frequently results in pen weights that are far too thick for the type size, and the letters appear as a blob of ink. Either that or too thin a pen, which appears thready and may not scan well. Truetypes appear the same no matter what the pen weight setting.
Also, use MTEXT for all text, which gives you word processor like control over the text appearance (italic, bold, etc.)
Examples of suitable truetype fonts are Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, and Swiss.
I use Arial. Every now and again I'll make a copy of a copy of a copy of a plat and see what's still legible. Arial performs well. Text leaders and fonts like Stylus BT, not so much.
Arial or Helvetica for me. Crisp and clean. What ever you do, don't use a serif. Also, capitalized L080 is a small as I go on plats or records of surveys. It is the minimum allowed in Oregon. Documents filed at the recorders office need text to be 0.10" at minimum.
Arial, bold, italic and bold italic. No smaller than 0.08in. Sometimes I will use .06in but not often.
I like Swiss, but any font will do as long as one follows the rules of capitalization. The size in my jurisdiction requires the font to be 1/10 inches, so I type 1/8 inches. That way the lowercase letters are 1/10 inches meeting the requirements. I'll never understand why notes on engineering plans and survey maps are all capital letters throughout.
Historic boundaries and conservation efforts.
I'll never understand why notes on engineering plans and survey maps are all capital letters throughout.
So you can type everything at 0.08 and not have your survey be rejected.
I'll never understand why notes on engineering plans and survey maps are all capital letters throughout.
Because of the text sizing issue which you detailed. It not just the letter height, its the spacing.
At least for me, alll capitals are very hard to read. My jurisdiction requires a minimum text size of 0.10 inches. As I wrote in my post, using a text size of 0.125 inches gets a text style that has lower case at 0.10 inches and the capital letters are just a bit bigger. That's what I do, but I've been told I was wrong. Now that I am in private practice I do not need to listen to anyone saying otherwise 😎
Historic boundaries and conservation efforts.
Lettering on the 1986 plat looks like Leroy, which would make sense for that time. Not much choice of font.
So it's Leroy's fault. There were no lower case Leroy lettering templates.
Historic boundaries and conservation efforts.
Bad bad Leroy Brown, baddest drafter in the whole damn town
Thanks to everyone who responded.
True Story, I was taught how to use a leroy template by a surveyor named Leroy.
So it's Leroy's fault. There were no lower case Leroy lettering templates.
There were lower case templates as well as several options for typeface, font or symbols. I've personally only seen the standard capital letter set used that I can recall.
It's been quite a while since I last saw a Leroy template, but I think that they had capitals on one side and lower case on the reverse.
The ones I recall had either all caps or all lower case; or caps and lower case depending on the size. When they had both, the caps were on the left side and the lower case were on the right side.
I remember seeing an old catalog that showed the various typefaces available. Some notable ones to me were they had a Russian and a Hebrew set as well as a music notation set.