UPPER or Lower?

All of the states I'm licensed in have a minimum text height of 0.08" in their standards. In order to have lower cased letters 0.08" high you are going to have to use a 0.12" sized font. That dictates line spacing. Which takes up a lot of real estate on the page.?ÿ So that is the reason. All upper case actually takes up less room.?ÿ ?ÿ

It's a holdover, when you leroyed a plat you didn't want to be constantly switching back and forth between slides.

Plus it is more readable from the standpoint of copies, scaling, now today scanning. The larger letter holds it's integrity better.

There were standards for plan sets to be drafted as an Arch D then scaled down to ledger size, so the lettering needed to be big enough to still see at half size. DOT used to demand L100 or larger lettering because of half size field sets. And of course all caps were better than lower case lettering, it's still something to consider.?ÿ

I've become less and less interested to making it easy for someone to scale and scan and still be able to read my drawings. One local surveyor would use tiny sized lettering just to keep people from printing off 8x11 scans of his ledger size plats. His complaint now is since he's older he can't read his own early plats.?ÿ

@mightymoe For me it was a hold over from 2 years of Mechanical Drawing in high school and the required drafting courses in college.  We were required to use all upper case letters.  I dropped an English course in college because my first two papers came back with a red "F" and no other marks.  When I finally cornered the teacher he said, "There is not enough differentiation between upper case and lower case letters".  I had been taught for three years at that point to use upper case and was not about to attempt to change for one English course.

Andy

Just make it easy to read... upper and lower case makes it so much easier.

yes, minimum font size and line spacing matters a lot.

@norman-oklahoma You are right. The recorder here requires the minimum text height to be one-tenth of and inch. So, I need to use a font that is one-eighth inches in height and the lower case letters get to be the minimum. Thank you.

@peter-ehlert

haven't seen you around much.  You all doing OK?

@mightymoe I knew Leroy was to blame for this. Thank you.

@paden-cash

we are all doing real well, thanks

To help keep my CAD text all upper, I have MText set so that all the letters are always UPPER. It makes it handy to not worry about having the CAPS Lock on or not.

@andy-bruner

Same for me...we were taught in High School to do uppercase lettering during mechanical drafting but I agree that the uppercase lettering holds up better during copying and scanning.

@geoff-ashworth

YES!!! I teach this to our production techs these days and they usually respond with "I didn't know that was an option!"

Plus, it keeps you from "yelling" at people in your emails/IMs. Hahaha

All UPPER annotation here; we're not writing novels, we're making maps, where a single illegible character is a problem.?ÿ And at the minimum allowable text height, no kerning.?ÿ Why? Because some maps are just too short on white space for bigger text so lowercase characters are still legible.?ÿ An example of a lo-res scan of 0.08" text:

?ÿ

An interesting resource

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog486/node/6

I used to be a 'small caps' drafter. It matches?ÿ my handwriting style and?ÿ copies well. As time wore on and plats became zoning documents I switched to all caps. It reduced the number of plat sheets...

I use both all caps and upper/lower; it depends on what I'm trying to do with the visual hierarchy of map elements.?ÿ ?ÿ

Everyone that drafts for me eventually gets my tedious and (I suspect) very boring "Maps are a language unto themselves...." lecture.?ÿ?ÿ

@andy-bruner  Same for me.  I had 1 year of Mechanical and 1 year of Architectural drafting, in the manual drafting days.  Hundreds of  8 1/2" x 11" sheets, front and back, lettered 1/8" with 1/8" spacing ... all by hand for homework.  My hand cramps to this day just thinking about all the hand lettering we did.  Plus, my first party chief and LS both told me to use upper case at all times in the field books.  It just stuck from there.

What is happening today is that everything is being scanned. It seems that the big issue with scanning is the quality. A quality scanner captures a crisp, clear scan of the map. When that is done there is a pdf that can be zoomed in, printed and copied so that each element on the map is clear. Even smaller text works well with a good scanner. A poor scanner makes a messy scan and often elements are lost. I refuse to make my new maps so that it will be look OK with a poor quality scanner, use a good scanner and my maps, even with some smaller details will work well.?ÿ

One type of map we make goes to a state agency. Back in the old days surveyors and engineers would often create colored maps. These worked great and even today they are very helpful. But no matter how often we plead with them, that agency will not allow newer maps to have any color. It all hangs on the issue of the first generation of scanners not being able to handle color very well and turning it all grey. Of course, that isn't an issue anymore. The old color maps compared to the newer hatched black and white maps show why we are begging to get rid of black and white hatching and go to color. Still not allowed.?ÿ

@mike-marks You have to have all that data on a map? Is this for recording or is that your worksheet?  

Posted by: @james-fleming

An interesting resource

https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog486/node/6

Thanks for posting that.?ÿ I'm a better drafter for having read it.