Text Styles

[Iceberg]

I am beginning the process of updating our company text and dimension styles. The reason behind this is that the CAD Standards are simply 10 years out dated and need to be refurbished a bit. With that said, the current text styles are setup using the Leroy system, meaning that I have a ton of text styles from L40 to L500.

So I have a few questions.

1. Should I keep the old Leroy system, which I think is not really necessary, and update them to annotative styles?
2. What is the majority of people doing? I know a lot of firms have swithched to the NCS but I am not sure of what standards they have set up for civil engineering?
3. Is the NCS the best way to go for text styles?

I want to simply the whole process yet keep it flexible at the same time.

Thank you for your time and imput.

[rkmcswain]

We had a similar system back in the days of AutoCAD + (add-on), and in Land Desktop - meaning we used multiple size based text styles -- L50, L60, L80, etc.
Once we moved to Civil 3D, we moved to one text style which is used for 95% of all annotation. The fixed text height is set to 0.0 in this style since annotative text and Civil 3D labels all work off of "plotted" text size.

[Iceberg]

Yeah, we are making the transition over from Eagle Point to Civil 3D and that is a main reason why I would like to make improvements to the current system. I know I will need a few different styles for existing and proposed information but just didn't want to waste time creating a bunch of waste styles.

I am familiar with annotative styles and I have them set up for my structural drafting with a set height of 3/32 (.09). But wasn't sure if this was what most peopled followed for civil drafting styles.

[cadtag]

The NCS doesn't really have much to say about text styles. Module 4 only says:

"The minimum text size is 3.2 mm (1/8") for hand drafting and 2.5 mm (3/32") for CAD. Smaller
text size is generally not legible on reduced or one-half size sets. The use of bold, italic, and
underline should not be used for notes."

And Module 7 says:
"Fonts should be capitalized, proportional, sans-serif, and non-stylized. Do not use italics,
underlining, bold, or other highlighting techniques."

Not a lot there to go by....

Back in the day we had defined a series of Leroy equivalents for simplex/romans styles, and a "point" style for Postscript fonts that would match Wordperfect output pretty closely. Had redefined the text command to chech for the active space (model or paper), and sized the Point or Leroy style height. These days with current software, I'm much more in favor of RK's approach.

I generally use only a few styles now, one named RomanS for notes, callouts, labels, etc. and one named Arial used for for titles and linetypes.

[Iceberg]

Thanks CADTAG, its good that there is freedom to some degree establish text styles when compared with the NCS.

I stay true to RomanS primarily for everything and if I need something a bit more bolder, I use RomanD and a heavier pen weight color. I have never been a fan of using TrueType fonts inside of CAD, they have been glitchy at times.

Thank you guys for your thoughts. I was leaning towards trimming everything down to I think, 3 or 4 styles (just cos the survey department requested a few) and set everything up that way. This will keep the process nice and simple.

[cadtag]

Well, the advantage of TrueType fonts is that they stay readable and with appropriate weight regardless of size. IMHO that makes them the appropriate font for text styles used in linetypes.

RomanD I've ignored for quite a while -- While trueType originally had some performance issues in CAD it has seemed quite reliable for the past several releases. And they are at least professionally designed fonts and as a rule more readable than any of the Acad shx fonts.

[dgorsman]

I've also had no real problems with TrueType fonts for the past couple of releases. Also, Arial is standard with operating systems so font substitution isn't such a problem as with SHX fonts. One other huge advantage is text capture when plotting to PDF ie. text in the PDF is searchable.