Working Drawings Handbook
laser printers or inkjet printers, will have access to all the
fonts installed on the operating system. There is a huge
choice of styles, any of which might be used for text
notes in the drawing. But remember that the aim of text
is to convey information clearly and concisely. Don’t go
overboard with too wild a font style and do use a size
that is big enough to read on site. Imagine that a
bricklayer with dirty hands is trying to read the drawing
in the rain before the paper tears.
Use one of the more common fonts, so that the text
looks the same whatever computer you use for plotting.
(If the font used to create text in the drawing isn’t
installed on the computer that is used for plotting, the
computer will attempt to substitute its best guess of
close match for you, with sometimes surprising
results!)
Arial is a simple and legible font and is widely used. Text
on CAD-produced drawings in this book has been
annotated in Arial.
Hand lettering
With the pre-eminence of CAD this tends to be a dying
skill. But even in the fully automated office there is from
time to time the need for a manually prepared and
lettered drawing, if only to provide the site office with an
urgently needed detail. Such occasions demand a
lettering style which is both rapid and legible.
Figure 4.21shows a recommended sequence of strokes
in the formation of individual upper case letters.
Increasing fluency and self-confidence (each generates
the other) will enable this stroke-making procedure to be
simplified in due course into an acceptable and rapidly
produced individual style. Horizontal guide lines are
beneficial and if they are in blue pencil they will not
appear on the subsequently produced dyeline print.
Lettering for general annotation should be a minimum
of 2 mm in height for upper case letters and 1.5 mm for
lower case. The spacing between lines of upper case
letters should not be less than the lettering itself. With
lower case lettering the space should be somewhat
greater than the lettering to allow for upstanding stems
and tails.4.21 Formation of the upper case alphabet