drafting-fonts - Mark
Thank you Paul. I think Arial monospace is going to serve my purpose well. But I will look into this "true type" stuff at some time. I do kind of remember about shx files now that you mention it; and I did think you were talking about AutoCAD fonts mainly, but I wanted to make sure. It's obvious that a lot of guys (on here) have worked through fonts they found work really well and make a sharp-looking plat. I am just amazed at some of the use-whatever-the-cad-defaults-to fonts and leave-anotated-lines-wherever-the-plotting-software-puts-it crap that I have seen come across my desk. Some draftsmen don't even see if some of their numbers are legible through their background.
How can a surveyor go through some of the analytical study and decision-making work they do and then put out illegible plats after all that?
By they way I have thoroughly enjoyed some of the case study (so to speak) real-life problems you have posted in the past. That's what a site like this is all about I think. Post more if you every have time.
MC
I'm moving from simplex to TT fonts like Arial. The newer fonts space the characters closer so they save a great deal of space on crowded maps. I have also run into problems lately printing older fonts on newer printers. We still edit many legacy drawings that have leroy, but it's time to move on now.
drafting-fonts - Mark
SHX and TTF are two completely different things, defined in very different manners.
The SHX fonts are like drawing lines in CAD, so as you size them larger and larger, you'll see the individual line segments that make up each piece of each letter. And since they are also basically line segments, you can use lineweight in CAD to alter the way they appear. You cannot use the "Bold" setting for an SHX font, and must instead use a heavier lineweight to make it appear darker.
The TTF fonts define the pieces of the letters differently, so you can essentially scale them to ANY size, and they will appear identical at all scales. They DO NOT honor linewights, but you can typically set them to "Bold" (as in MS Word) to make specific text appear darker.
In general, I prefer the TTFs. We pretty much phased out our use of all SHX fonts like simplex.shx and romans.shx about three or four years ago. The TTFs (like Arial) just look so much better, because TTFs can "taper" the width of different parts of each letter, making them look like something a printing press would create (can't do that with SHX fonts). And since we don't use CTB files, but STB files, the whole idea of using lineweights to change individual words to bold in an MTEXT became an issue. We don't have that issue with TTFs. It got REALLY annoying trying to position multiple overlapping text entities JUST RIGHT to get that one word in bold type in the middle of an MTEXT block. It's easy to change color for a single word if you're using CTB, but you can't change the lineweight of a single word in an MTEXT block if you're using STB.
