WORKING DRAWINGS HANDBOOK, Fourth Edition

Drawing the set

 Most users—both producer and recipient—will
possess or have access to an A4 photocopier with
the facility that this offers to, for example, the
contractor who wishes to get alternative quotes for a
particular item and can rapidly produce his own
copies of the particular drawing. The A3 copier is still
something of an expensive rarity (though their use in
contractors’ and professional offices is becoming
more common).
 The restricted size of sheet makes it more suitable
for producing standard drawings, where it is
necessary to limit the amount and extent of the
information shown in order to preserve its
‘neutrality’.

 Architects’ instructions are frequently accompanied

by a sketch detail and the A4 format simplifies filing

and retrieval.

 A bound set of A4 drawings is suitable for shelf

storage. A3s are an inconvenient size to store, whether

on a shelf, in a plan chest drawer, or in a vertifile.

 A4s can be carried around easily.

The disadvantages of the A4 format are:

 The drawing area is altogether too small. One is

constantly being forced into the position of limiting

what is shown because there is just not room on the

paper, or of selecting an inappropriately small scale.

 There is no room to record amendments adequately,

or for that matter to incorporate a reasonably

informative title panel.

 Builders don’t like them.

The choice is not easy but on the whole the authors are

inclined to favour A3 as the smallest sheet of a set, if

only for the pragmatic reason that you can, at a pinch,

hang them landscape in a vertifile; that you can, at a

pinch, bind them into a specification or a bill of quantities

and fold them double; that you can, at a pinch, copy

them in two halves on an electro-static copier and

sellotape the two halves together; and that wasting paper

is, in the last resort, cheaper than redrawing a detail

which in the end just would not quite go on the sheet.

Drawing conventions

In the same way that line thickness is influenced by

considerations of scale and the relative importance of

the objects delineated, so too is the degree of detail by

which various elements are represented. The manner in

which a door or a window is shown on a 1:20 assembly

drawing is not necessarily appropriate to their

representation on a 1:100 general arrangement plan.

As always, common sense and absolute clarity of

expression are the criteria. If a door frame is detailed

4.4 Derivation of the rectangle A0, with a surface
area of 1 m^2

4.5 ‘A’ sizes retain the same proportions (1:√2). Each
sheet is half the size of its predecessor