Font in drawings

[jcapriotti]

How was the font on your drawings and documents determined?

The powers that be where I work tried many years ago when they bought our company to dictate that our documents/drawings use the new company font. Yes, we have custom company fonts and this font bared the company name. Well, we got sold off and our company name changed and we are no longer allowed to use the old name anywhere. So new computers coming in no longer have the old font, and guess what happens when you open drawings made with a font that is not installed on you PC. Especially a font that was very narrow in spacing. Text is now off the page and overflowing the title block.

Luckily, I went against the company standard long ago and set our drawing fonts to a Windows font. So we only have a few really old drawings to contend with. But now, the new company, is trying to push the same thing. They created their own font, and they want to dictate its use in our drawings............deja vu all over.

[SPerman]

You never told us you worked for DSS.

Talk about focusing on the wrong things.

[jcapriotti]

You never told us you worked for DSS.

Talk about focusing on the wrong things.

Welcome to corporate life.

[zwei]

Maybe try proposing a secondary font?

We have a primary font which is custom font that is used for website, branding, etc
And a secondary font which is window font that is used by most people in email, drawing etc

[Glenn Schroeder]

How was the font on your drawings and documents determined? . . .

When I first moved off the construction crew and started using Solidworks, if I remember right they were using Garamond. I know it was one of the fonts with serifs. I didn't care much for it, so after a while I typed up some stuff using the old font and Arial, and went around asking various people here which was easier to read. The younger people mostly picked Garamond, and the older picked Arial.

Arial won (don't tell anyone, but it's possible there would have been a miscount if it didn't), and we've been using it ever since.

[KennyG]

@jcapriotti We looked for printed readability especially at reduced print scales while still being relatively compact, differentiation between the letters O & I from the numbers 0 & 1, and a common font that everybody was sure to have. We ended up with Arial as our standard.

[mike miller]

We are out 180 degrees from @jcapriotti's company. No one really cares what font we decide to use as long as it meets several common sense standards (pretty much what @KennyG specified). Our drawings have used a mix of Arial, Century Gothic, and Calibri. I have bigger fish to fry, for better or worse......

Maybe someday when we get every last drawing into a managed environment and have nothing better to do we'll standardize all the fonts.

edit to add: I have NO idea why Solid Edge comes standard like this. A confusing font and green color (seriously?!).

2021-12-10 11_29_11.jpg (18.58 KiB) Viewed 1933 times

[jcapriotti]

Most of these are better than the old AutoCAD montxt.

We have used Tahoma for a long time on our drawings. I refused to use the company font and our internal drafting group selected Tahoma. Arial was pretty common in our Word and Excel templates until corporate gave us new ones with the font setup as a style. We still change them to Tahoma when we find them but it's hard to police documents coming from over a 100 people who have the standard company templates with the company font set.

I just noticed that Y14.5 has a font. Kind of small, all below are set to the same point size. I like Courier New when do data analysis as it's an equal space font and sometimes its helpful when you need to consider a set number of characters.

[HerrTick]

A while back, I worked in a place with a lot of senior people who complained a lot about readability. I circulated drawing samples with different fonts for a poll. Century Gothic was the winner by a wide margin.

[AlexLachance]

Why not use the drawing standards card and tell them that the only place these fonts can be applied on drawings are for company logos, that's it. Enforce it upon them, don't let them enforce something ridiculous over you. Outrdicule them, tell them the program doesn't allow you to, tell them the program only uses standard fonts, tell them the program crashes, find something creative and believable to make them lay off the mandatory use of company font.

Heck, maybe you don't even have to have a white lie, just explain to the right person the cost of these ridiculous decisions over the last few years. I'm pretty sure it would be rather easy to show all the work that it has caused, all the issues that it has caused, and that these outweighs the 'gain' of having the font on the drawing. Find their language, if it's money then speak money.

You can reload templates that have changed logos/fonts to have them update themselves, but in your case it seems to be causing more issues then solving.

[jcapriotti]

Why not use the drawing standards card and tell them that the only place these fonts can be applied on drawings are for company logos, that's it. Enforce it upon them, don't let them enforce something ridiculous over you. Outrdicule them, tell them the program doesn't allow you to, tell them the program only uses standard fonts, tell them the program crashes, find something creative and believable to make them lay off the mandatory use of company font.

Heck, maybe you don't even have to have a white lie, just explain to the right person the cost of these ridiculous decisions over the last few years. I'm pretty sure it would be rather easy to show all the work that it has caused, all the issues that it has caused, and that these outweighs the 'gain' of having the font on the drawing. Find their language, if it's money then speak money.

You can reload templates that have changed logos/fonts to have them update themselves, but in your case it seems to be causing more issues then solving.

The corporate machinery is tough to slog through, especially when the mothership is in another country. I did push back and often just outright defy them in some cases because of the issues they don't understand. I just don't get this need to create a font for anything other than our logo.

[AlexLachance]

The corporate machinery is tough to slog through, especially when the mothership is in another country. I did push back and often just outright defy them in some cases because of the issues they don't understand. I just don't get this need to create a font for anything other than our logo.

I feel you, been there. When you do get the right person's attention, it does wonders.

It does look nice though to have a distinguished font for your company when sending e-mails or webiste, but besides that, I don't see anywhere else where It would/could be enforced. They certainly wouldn't try to enforce it on legal papers lol

If you do end up giving in, make sure to have some form of agreement with the management so that these changes can only occur every X years or something similar.

Wish you the best mate