Hand-drawn fonts, font color

[Gene Davis]

I was thinking of changing my template and having a new hand-type font. I have been using Blueprintdbt, which is the same as Chief Blueprint, but it comes earlier in the alphabetic list, so I'm set to it. I did a pic, using a rich text block, of all the fonts I have that have the hand-lettered look. The two that say "don't have" are demo sets I downloaded, that are not complete with numbers.

What are you using, and why? Is it worth it to you for the small investment to have a purchased font such as My Hand or Frank the Architect?

And as regards font color, are you using a font color other than black, and why? The out of box layer color for dimensions is a dark blue, and for text, a blue that is a little lighter. I print to .pdf in color, but have my printing done in grayscale from the color original, and I can tell that my dims and text are a tiny bit lighter than if they had been printed in black. So what do you do?

[Tommy Blair]

I was thinking of changing my template and having a new hand-type font. I have been using Blueprintdbt, which is the same as Chief Blueprint, but it comes earlier in the alphabetic list, so I'm set to it. I did a pic, using a rich text block, of all the fonts I have that have the hand-lettered look. The two that say "don't have" are demo sets I downloaded, that are not complete with numbers.

What are you using, and why? Is it worth it to you for the small investment to have a purchased font such as My Hand or Frank the Architect?

And as regards font color, are you using a font color other than black, and why? The out of box layer color for dimensions is a dark blue, and for text, a blue that is a little lighter. I print to .pdf in color, but have my printing done in grayscale from the color original, and I can tell that my dims and text are a tiny bit lighter than if they had been printed in black. So what do you do?

Gene, I know that people like to be artistic with their plans...especially people that do hand drawn plans. I use Arial font in black. Ever since I got comments a long time ago from two plan checkers in the Planning Department on how easy it was for them to read my plans, I have decided to stick with it. I have recieved plans from Architects for modeling and there have been several times I couldn't read some of the text or dimensions because of the font. I have to admit though, that this problem generally occurs from hand written plans that look really cool but is sometimes hard to read.

[gawdzira]

I use MyHand2. It is close to my actual lettering in case I need to add something to the drawing by hand when turning in a set to the building department. Thus the main reason to use a hand drawn font is the same reason that we (proverbial) learned to make our lettering look the the same in (architecture) school. And, it looks less sterile. And it adds a "je ne se quois" to the drawing. And it is less filling.

[Tommy Blair]

I use MyHand2. It is close to my actual lettering in case I need to add something to the drawing by hand when turning in a set to the building department.

Alan, here in Houston, if your plans were generated by a computer, they will no longer let you add anything by hand after you submit the plans starting several years ago. They make you reprint.

[gawdzira]

Tommy, does that mean they are accepting or requiring digital copies?

[Tommy Blair]

Tommy, does that mean they are accepting or requiring digital copies?

If the planning Dept. requires additional or missing notes, etc. when you submit it, they will reject it and you have to reprint before they will stamp it. They will not accept anything placed by a pen in the plan to get a stamp. Each time you submit a plan, it can take from one to two weeks before you get it back. Once it's been stamped by the City of Houston, and you have made structural revisions, the revised pages have to be printed separately with a revision date and are attached to the original stamped plans.

[VHampton]

Out of all the choices I like the Architect and Graphite Lite for ease of reading. Years ago I tried to make all the drawings look as if they were hand lettered. Archititl and Architxt were my top two choices for this.

Interestingly I had a couple of complaints about slight difficulty in reading the text, especially the numbers.

Now I do as Tommy said...Arial works great. Tahoma and Andalus also make the cleanest notes and numbers.

Aside from these options, I also like Chief Blueprint for dimensions.

[Ben Palmer]

Make sure to write out all the numbers as well...some fonts do well with letters but not numbers...worth looking into that to make sure your dimensions, etc are legible.

Good luck.

[kiwideziner]

I went to chief blueprint as I dont seem to get the truncating etc problems that some people get. havent had a complaint about readability.

[Wheels]

I use 'Berlin Sans FB' for text, 'Candara' for labels, and 'ZapfHumnst BT' for Room labels. I picked my fonts based on the appearance of the numbers. Occassionally I will change room label font to match the builders Company Logo font to add a measure of customization. Hand written fonts are hard to read especially when your printer runs low on black and there is no font worse than country blueprint. Absolutely NO handwritten info. allowed in Medicine Hat, Alberta either.