Standard fonts

[Skipa]

Hello all,


Since there's so much professionals around here I would like to ask about the fonts you use in official drawings.

If I've understood correctly from the designing books I have been reading, it's important to use standardized fonts (and maybe not Arial, Courier or something you possibly found from your font library).

So which font should I start to use? ISOCP.SHX is too ugly even for technical drawings, but ISOCPEUR looks nice and should work better (I live in Europe).

Or is it OK to use almost any font I found?

[CADTutor]

I guess it's a matter of preference. So long as you stick with one of the standard AutoCAD .SHX fonts or one of the standard Windows .TTF fonts, anyone else using AutoCAD will be able to see your fonts as you do.

Personally, I have always used either the RomanS.SHX font (very clear and neat for notes and dims on printed drawings - reads well at small sizes) or Arial.TTF where a solid font is required. The two are quite similar and work well together (Arial for headings and RomanS for body text).

http://www.cadimage.net/cadtutor/fonts.gif

Although ISOCPEUR is a good looking font, it is a compact font and doesn't always read well at smaller sizes.

[dbroada]

Our office standard is simplex.shx, mainly because it's what we used at release 11 and it was quick and readable. Now machines are faster we could use something else but there's really no need. If a monospaced font is needed either monospace.shx or txt.shx are used although I find monospaced fonts ugly and avoid them as much as possible. We only use TTF fonts for artwork and we try to use a san serif font from the swiss/helvetica family.

[ReMark]

Our office typically uses the RomanS, RomanD and RomanT fonts. However, if it is imperative to distinguish between the letter "O" and the number "0" and to also distinguish between the number "1" and a lowercase "l" (ell) then we use a font we purchased sometime ago called "ufroman4.shx". Zeros then get a diagonal line thru them and the number "1" gets the hook at the top and the small horizontal baseline at the bottom. Recognition problems solved.

We tend to stay away from overly complex fonts as they use too much ink and are difficult to read when D-size drawings are reduced down to B-size. But it's really all a matter of personal or company preference now, isn't it?

[fuccaro]

At my past job I wrote the office standards. We used a "normal" font for the most of the cases, a sheriff font for large amount of texts, a monospace for aligning numbers ,a "not filled" font to save ink when used in big titles-I think it was Swis721BlkOulLBT-, and finaly: the Comic Sans MS for hand notes placed on a non printing layer.