I saw a thread here on 'Architectural fonts', and noticed that no one picked up on some important points (so I suppose I should make them here). Draughting from High School once taught people how to letter on guide lines on technical drawings. This continued into the field of engineering and building, but draughtsmen began to be identified by their handwriting on drawings, departing slightly from the textbook. Nothing too fancy or illegible would have been allowed, just a strong confident hand. Architects were the exception - they could scrawl away as they saw fit, and it certainly made particular architects instantly recognisable and well-known. Perhaps the most famous example would be the Scottish Architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh; today the printing he used on his drawings is used on everything from mugs to tee-shirts (it may even be a 'font')! However, the German DIN standard form of lettering became the world legal standard, and was used for airport signs, toilets, motorway signs and became the standard for building and all forms of technical drawings in the era of velograph, plastic pencils, and technical pens from Rotring and Staedtler Mars. Using the special pencils and pens along with standard letting templates, made draughtsmen interchangeable again. The DIN was adopted by all world legal standards organisations - including the ISO and the BSI. The lettering is known as ISO. ISO lettering not only allowed different draughtsmen to letter on a drawing without detection, but it allowed for resizing in copiers (on the principles behind the A-Series of paper sizes) and for microfilming reductions and reproductions. The idea is that the characters have certain heights related to the drawing sheet: for example, A0 (one square metre of paper, ratio of sided: 1 to sq.root of two) used the widest range: drawing numbers (largest) would be 7mm high with a stroke width of 0.7mm (using a 0.7 nib pen/pencil), for half this size - A1 the drawing number would be 5mm high using a stroke of 0.5mm and so forth. The nib or stroke was always related to the character height, and the range was: 10mm, 7mm, 5mm, 3.5mm, and 2.5mm (the smallest). If you then enlarged an A1 drawing to A0, the characters would enlarge in proportion likewise vice versa! After 30 years of this, AutoCAD now provides for SI (mm) as opposed to metric (cm), and has provided a conforming font - ISOCPEUR.ttf Now any CAD drawing produced using ISOCPEUR cannot be distinguished from hand-produced drawings of 20 years ago! However, until very recently, ARIEL and other TTF fonts were known to crash networks when sent to the printer, and drawing file sizes were greatly increased (this used to matter a lot). The advice was to ALWAYS USE AN AUTOCAD SHX FONT (rather than a TTF). Thus, Romantic Simplex became the CAD (or AUTOCAD) standard -- romans.shx. The trouble with ROMANS is that when it is faxed, reduced or otherwise manipulated, the 6s get mixed up with 9s, 0s and so forth. It has caused considerable problems in that respect over the years. ARIEL is a Microsoft font -- and was Microsoft's way of getting around paying Adobe for Helvetica. Ariel is basically a poor imitation of Helvetica, but it is much more widely supported across a range of software. Using strange fonts on AutoCAD drawings can be problemmatic. If you set a style (say, called "Dave") and associated this style with Illustrator.ttf, then you will have a handwritten 'architectural' looking drawing -- but e-mail it to someone who has not gone to abstractfonts.com and downloaded Illustrator.ttf, and their AutoCAD will SUBSTITUTE another font (more than likely this will be SIMPLEX or TXT by default).... and as the character kerning/spacing etc. is different, the end result is a drawing where the text overlaps, and where titles continue outside the box...very ugly! For many years, the bottom line was to use romans.shx (it is never substituted as it comes with ACAD), it is small, never crashes the network or hangs the plotter, and drawings always look they way they did when they left your system. If you DO wish to use TTF or strange fonts, then (1) do your drawing in romans and change the style at the end to get the spacings to look right (especially with MTEXT) and (2) if you send your drawing file by e-mail or on CD -- then also send the font file and some instructions!
